Jul 19, 2024
By: Ayush Mehrotra
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This outage happened when thieves entered the Vodafone data centre in Hampshire using sledgehammers. Because of this breach, it affected services in the UK, and Vodafone ended up with a flood of angry complaints from customers.
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The Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) suffered a major security breach in 2011 that led to an outage lasting for 23 days. The breach compromised the personal information of approximately 77 million accounts, including names, addresses, and possibly credit card details.
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In October 2016, a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeted Dyn, a major DNS provider. The attack used a large botnet of IoT devices to overwhelm Dyn's servers, causing major outages for sites like Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix and Twitter (currenlty X).
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AWS suffered an outage in its S3 storage service in the US-East-1 region. The incident was caused by human error during a debugging session and led to widespread disruptions across the internet, affecting numerous websites and applications that rely on AWS.
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An outage for an airline affects not only the organisation but also the passengers travelling with it. In 2017, an IT contractor accidentally switched off the 'uninterruptible power supply' at a data centre which resulted in damaging servers. Because of this, the airline had to cancel multiple flights across the globe.
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Amazon faced its worst possible outage during the 2018 Prime Day sale. Within 15 minutes of the sale, servers weren’t able to handle the traffic volume, leading to a cascading series of failures. This happened because Amazon wasn't able to estimate the popularity of its sale.
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Facebook, along with its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for nearly six hours. The outage was caused by a configuration change on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres. According to reports because of this incident, Facebook lost about $60 million in advertising revenue and its shares got hit by 5%.
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This is currently the largest tech outage the world is facing. The outage began on Thursday evening due to a security update from CrowdStrike. Many users in countries like India, Australia, Germany, the United States, and the UK are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Many businesses, including airlines, banks, supermarkets, and media outlets, are affected by the issue.
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