CrowdStrike's global outage wreaked havoc. Here are 6 other major tech outages from recent years
Computer systems around the world failed Friday because of a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, in what may have been the largest tech outage the world has ever seen.
The incident grounded flights, disrupted banks and other financial institutions, and took news broadcasts off the air for hours.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said early Friday that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
As businesses get up and running again, it’s becoming clear that industries will still be reeling from the impacts of the massive outage for days and maybe weeks to come.
With that in mind, check out some of the biggest tech outages we’ve experienced in recent years.
Meta
Meta’s uber-popular social media sites Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp all switched off for a whopping six hours on Oct. 4, 2021. A routine maintenance job gone awry effectively disconnected all Facebook data centers globally, affecting more than 10 million users worldwide.
Fastly
On June 8, 2021, cloud computing services provider Fastly experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug. The company said it detected the problem within a minute, and within 49 minutes, 95% of its network was operating as normal. The outage took down a sizable slice of the internet, including Amazon, Target, CNN, the Gov.uk website, Reddit, The New York Times, CNN, PayPal, and Spotify.
Google has suffered a handful of outages in recent years, which have caused its apps and services to crash. Arguably its biggest outage took place on Dec. 14, 2020, a time when many people were still working and studying remotely at the heigh of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that incident, Google services including Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube all went dark for about an hour.
Cloudflare DNS
A number of major websites and services were offline for about 25 minutes on July 17, 2020, after a Cloudflare DNS router announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to go offline. Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify, and League of Legends were all affected by the outage, TechCrunch reported at the time.
Spotify
With more than 2.9 million outage reports, according to DownDetector, Spotify suffered the largest outage of 2022. On March 8 of that year, the most popular streaming platform in the world left users without their favorite tracks and podcasts for almost two hours.
British Airways
An “uncontrolled return of power” following an outage damaged servers in British Airways’ data centre, causing a massive IT shutdown that left 75,000 passengers stranded on May 27, 2017.