Written By Pranav Sawant
7 major global outages of all time that we cannot forget
From the latest Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage to Akamai/Cloudflare outage, here are some of the major global outages of all time.
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Major global outages
Outages are bad and they make us realise that a small mistake can disconnect you from the entire world. Although most outages are fixed quickly, some stay for long hours and even days. Here are all the top major global outages of all time.
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Microsoft CrowdStrike outage
Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage is the latest and is said to be one of the biggest ones as it affected Windows PCs and Microsoft 365 apps/services like Excel, Powerpoint, Defender, and others. This happened on a Friday weekend affecting millions of Windows PCs. The reason for this was a content update that controls the Falcon sensor for security on Windows.
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Amazon Web Services outage
In 2017's Amazon Web Services outage, millions of cloud service and website users were affected. The outage made sites and services like Quora, Slack, Medium, Coursera, and others inaccessible for hours. There were also other AWS outages in 2021 and 2022 that affected Netflix and Disney+ among other services.
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Meta outage
It would be criminal to talk about outages and not talk about Meta. October 4, 2021's Meta outage affected Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, making the platforms inaccessible for over 6 hours. Earlier this year, in March, all of Meta apps, the aforementioned two, and Threads and Messenger were down for almost 2 hours.
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British Airways IT failure
Back in 2017, a global IT crash caused the airline's entire fleet to be grounded. Several passengers were stranded on the weekend. The reason for this outage was that an IT maintenance contractor accidently switched off an uninterrupted power supply at a key data centre.
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Alphabet outage
Alphabet-owned Google's services were down for an hour on December 14, 2020. The outage made YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive inaccessible. The outage affected over 12,000 YouTube users globally, with major impacts in the US, India, UK.
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X Corp Outage
One of the other big outages was the X Corp outage back on December 28, 2022. Thousands of users globally were unable to access the platform, limiting them from posting, quoting, and using other features of the platform.
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Akamai and Cloudflare Outage
Akamai's outage in 2021 was a major one that affected websites and services like GitHub, Airbnb, and British Airways due to an Edge DNS service issue. Cloudflare outage in 2020 is another outage that the Internet cannot forget as it affected several big websites and those using the Cloudflare service.
