A global tech outage disrupted operations across various sectors, affecting airlines, broadcasters, banking, and healthcare services on Friday. Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike reported working with customers impacted by a defect found in a Microsoft Windows update.
Here are the biggest outages in recent years:
British Airways - May 2017
In May 2017, British Airways experienced a major computer system failure, stranding 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend. The disruption, attributed to a maintenance contractor accidentally switching off power, resulted in significant public relations challenges for the airline.
Alphabet - December 2020
Google services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive, faced an hour-long outage on December 14, 2020. The outage affected over 12,000 YouTube users globally, with significant impacts in the United States, Britain, and India.
Fastly - June 2021
In June 2021, a widespread outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly affected thousands of government, news, and social media websites worldwide. High-traffic sites like Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, and the New York Times experienced disruptions ranging from a few minutes to an hour.
Akamai - June 2021
On June 17, 2021, the websites of numerous financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States went down briefly due to server-related issues at content delivery network provider Akamai. The problem stemmed from a bug in the firm's software.
Meta - October 2021
Meta-owned platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were inaccessible for six hours on October 4, 2021. The outage, affecting 10.6 million users worldwide, was caused by a faulty configuration change.
X Corp - December 2022
Twitter, now known as X Corp, experienced a major outage on December 28, 2022. Tens of thousands of users globally were unable to access the platform or use its features for several hours. Downdetector reported over 10,000 affected users in the U.S., about 2,500 in Japan, and 2,500 in the UK at the peak of the disruption.
(With inputs from Reuters)
