Aug 29, 2024
By: Prerna Tyagi
Reddit faced a widespread outage, affecting thousands of its users globally for around 45 minutes on Wednesday. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest IT outages in recent history:
A routine update from CrowdStrike turned into a global disaster when it caused Windows versions 10 and higher to crash. The outage wasn’t just an inconvenience—it disrupted critical services worldwide, including hospitals, 911 operations, and airlines.
In October 2021, billions of users were locked out of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for hours. The cause? A technical glitch that disconnected Facebook’s data centres from the network.
A configuration error at Fastly, a major content delivery network, triggered a global outage that brought down websites like Amazon, Reddit, and the New York Times. Even the UK government’s services were affected.
A simple error turned into a costly disaster when a contractor accidentally cut the power supply to British Airways' data centre. When the power was restored, it caused extensive damage to servers, leading to massive flight cancellations and stranding 75,000 passengers. The financial hit? Over $100 million according to reports.
Amazon Web Services, the backbone of countless online services, suffered a major outage in its US-East-1 region due to a network device overload. The impact was widespread, with services like Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon’s own retail operations going offline.
When Google’s authentication system ran out of storage space, it caused one of the biggest internet outages ever. For 45 minutes, services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive were inaccessible. According to Fox Business, Google lost $1.7 million in ad revenue during the YouTube outage.
A glitch in Google Cloud’s system led to a two-hour outage for Spotify and Discord, leaving millions without music or messaging. The issue quickly escalated, with users unable to log in or send messages.
A massive DDoS attack on DYN, a Domain Name System (DNS) provider, caused major platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, and Netflix to go offline, particularly in Europe and North America.