" alt="" title=""/>The Internet has become an irreplaceable tool in most of the world, serving as the backbone for commercial operations and e-commerce, worldwide news and commentary on social media, and for health and public welfare.
We take the internet for granted when it works well. It’s similar to breathing. We don’t think about it or what goes on behind the scenes.
But as soon as it stops working, we realize the authority of its presence in our daily lives. The internet is becoming more and more centralized. As a result, it has become more prone to catastrophic failures.
Here is the list of the worst server outages in recent internet history:
Dyn cyber attack in 2016
This disaster hit people on two continents, including the United States and Europe, as well as popular platforms like Airbnb, Amazon, BBC, CNN, eBay, Netflix and Twitter. Several Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks attacked Dyn’s Managed Domain Name System (DNS) service.
British Airways IT outage in 2017
The entire British Airways fleet was shut down in 2017 due to a major IT outage that disrupted the travel plans of thousands of passengers not only in the UK but around the world who wanted to board a British Airways flight.
Failure of the Microsoft Azure cloud in 2018
Microsoft is one of the companies that offer Azure cloud servers as a platform for app development. However, on June 20, 2018, the big cloud company’s fate turned for the worse. In a nightmare scenario, human error at one of Microsoft’s data centers in Dublin, Ireland resulted in an 11 hour outage.
The year 2019: Facebook server failure
While Facebook and its services have suffered countless outages over the years, the one on March 13, 2019 was by far the worst at 7.5 million people, according to DownDetector. According to Downdetector, people were bothered with Facebook services for almost a day and a half.
The year 2020: Google server crash
The world watched a collapse in Google services in December 2020, resulting in a global outage of key services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, and others – while some people were working from home during the pandemic. Finally, an investigation revealed that the problem was caused by a storage quota issue within the company.
June 8, 2021: Fastly Glitch caused a worldwide internet outage
Amazon.com, Reddit, Twitch, Github, Shopify, Spotify, and others were all hit by the outage related to an issue with Fastly, a cloud computing service provider employed by several of these companies. The problem was caused by an undetected bug, according to Fastly’s blog.
June 17, 2021: Many US airlines and Australian banks hit online outage
A breakdown at the technology company Akamai led to a global power failure that affected large institutions and airlines. Many companies around the world had experienced online outages on their websites, according to monitoring site Downdetector.
