A faulty software update caused technological havoc worldwide on Friday, grounding flights, knocking down some financial companies and news outlets, and disrupting hospitals, small businesses and government offices.
The trouble was sparked by an update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and only affected its customers running Microsoft Windows, the world’s most popular operating system for personal computers. The outage disrupted computer networks around the globe, causing serious damage to the stock market, IT, banking, airlines, media, hospitals, and many other sectors.
The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) error caused the system to suddenly shut down or restart for millions of Windows users worldwide. BSoD occurs if a serious problem causes Windows to sudden shut down or restart unexpectedly to prevent damage to the computer.
While the disruption highlights the fragility of globally connected technology, similar disruptions, albeit varying in scale, have been seen over the last few years.
Dyn Cyber Attack (2016)
In October 2016, Dyn, a company that manages a large portion of the internet’s domain name system (DNS) infrastructure, became the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The Dyn cyberattack brought down the internet. Millions of major websites in the United States, including Twitter, Amazon, GitHub, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and others went down for hours. Many internet-connected devices, including printers, IP cameras, and baby monitors, were vulnerable to malware attacks.
British Airways IT Failure (2017)
In May 2017, British Airways suffered a major IT malfunction over one of the busiest travel weekends in the UK. Around 75,000 passengers were impacted, and 672 planes were grounded, as per news reports. The company claimed that an engineer unplugged the data center’s power supply, causing a major power outage.
Google Outage (2020)
Google suffered a worldwide outage, with failures reported across the company’s services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and YouTube, in December 2020. It only lasted about 45 minutes but impacted millions of users worldwide. The issue happened due to inadequate storage capacity for the company’s authentication tools.
Amazon Outage (2021)
In December 2021, there was a significant outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lasted several hours. Numerous well-known companies, such as Netflix, Disney, Spotify, DoorDash, and Venmo, experienced operational disruptions due to the outage. It was an automated issue that led to strange behaviour on several servers. Customers were unable to access certain cloud services due to the outage.
Fastly Server Down (2021)
Fastly, a cloud service provider, went down in June 2021. It brought down several significant international news websites, including CNN and the New York Times, as well as e-commerce merchants like Amazon and numerous other firms. A defective software update that originated from a misconfiguration was the cause of the outage, which affected numerous servers.
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