By Priyanka Deshpande
CNBC-TV18.com
Published July 19, 2024
A global tech outage on Friday disrupted multiple industries, halting flights, taking broadcasters off air, and affecting banking and healthcare services.
CrowdStrike is assisting customers impacted by a defect in a Microsoft Windows update. Here are some major tech outages in recent years, listed chronologically as reported by the news agency Reuters:
In May 2017, British Airways, owned by IAG, experienced a computer system failure that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, causing a PR disaster. Media reports attribute the blackout to a maintenance contractor accidentally switching off power.
On December 14, 2020, Google services like YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive were down for an hour. DownDetector reported over 12,000 YouTube users affected globally, including in the US, Britain, and India.
In June 2021, a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly hit thousands of government, news, and social media websites globally. Affected sites included Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times.
On June 17, 2021, server glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai briefly took down the websites of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US. The issue was due to a software bug.
Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.
On December 28, 2022, Twitter experienced a major outage, affecting tens of thousands of users worldwide for several hours. Downdetector reported over 10,000 affected users in the US, around 2,500 in Japan, and 2,500 in the UK at the peak.