5 worst IT outages and failures that shook the tech world

In today’s technology-driven world, IT outages can have a significant impact on businesses and individuals alike. From disrupting operations to causing financial losses, these outages can be a nightmare for anyone relying on technology for daily tasks. Let’s look at the top 5 biggest IT outages in history and see what we can learn from them.

Top 5 internet outages that shook the world

1. Crowdstrike outage: Faulty software update

Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company known for its endpoint protection solutions, experienced a major outage on July 19th, 2024. The firm had pushed out a software update that led to Microsoft’s operating system crashing. This resulted in a global outage causing significant disruption to Windows users. According to statistics around 8.5 million devices were affected with the blue screen of death (BSOD).

Remember when major services like airports, hospitals, public transport, financial services, and even several media outlets went down after this massive outage? It cost Fortune 500 companies a whopping $5.4 billion, making it the biggest IT outage in history. Crowdstrike had to jump into action quickly to resolve the issue and restore its services to prevent further damage.

However, this incident underscores the need for businesses to rely on a diverse range of software solutions to mitigate global outage problems.

2. Amazon Web Services outage: A human typo

The tech world was rocked when Amazon Web Services (AWS), the biggest player in cloud computing, experienced a major outage in 2017. However, the reason behind the four-hour-long downtime was a human-made typo in a debugging session.

This disruption had a domino effect, causing chaos for countless websites and services like Slack, Quora, Medium and Business Insider. But that’s not all, AWS’s outage made a ripple effect on S&P 500 companies to lose $150 million.

It was a wake-up call, highlighting the need for backup plans and system redundancy. Companies also realised the risks of depending solely on a single provider, and the importance of diversifying their options.

3. Facebook outage: System bug

Can you picture a world without Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram? Hard to imagine, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened in October 2021 when Meta (formerly Facebook) experienced a massive global outage that lasted for 6 to 7 hours. This outage affected billions of users worldwide, leading to a significant drop in user engagement and ad revenue.

According to data from Bloomberg, Meta suffered a staggering $47.3 billion loss in market value, with Mark Zuckerberg himself losing around $6 billion. It was revealed in a blog post by Meta that the global crash occurred due to a system bug that prevented the staff from fixing a faulty command. The company later issued a public apology for the inconvenience caused.

4. Google outage: Storage trouble

The search engine giant’s 45-minute-long outage caused an internet meltdown in 2020. An internal storage issue in Google’s authentication system could not free up space. This caused the system to crash leading to a major outage that impacted a wide range of services, including YouTube, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Maps and many more. Millions of users could not log in and had no choice but to wait for the restoration of these services. Data from Fox Business reveals that Google lost $1.7 million in ad revenue from YouTube’s downtime.

5. DYN outage: Overwhelming DDoS attack

In 2016, DYN, a popular DNS provider, suffered a major outage that lasted for several hours. The firm faced a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack via IP cameras, IoT devices, etc to overwhelm Dyn’s servers.

This outage affected a wide range of services Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, CNN, Netflix, Amazon, and many others mainly in Europe and North America. Hackers leveraged the Mirai botnet, a malicious software to infect numerous devices ultimately causing big platforms to go down.

The internet is a funny place

Even the largest and most reputable technology companies are susceptible to IT outages. Both businesses and individuals must establish contingency plans and diversify their IT infrastructure in order to minimise widespread disruptions. Drawing from past mistakes can provide valuable insights for better preparing for future IT challenges.