biggest internet outage ever

By | December 13, 2022

A massive internet outage has affected websites including the Guardian, the UK government's website gov.uk, Amazon and Reddit. Facebook Outage Left Latin America Dark, Where WhatsApp Dominates. Countries affected: United States and Europe, Impact: Millions of users of popular sites including Airbnb, Amazon, BBC, CNN, eBay, Netflix and Twitter. Below is a timeline of originations from AS5800 this year. Despite the 2013 activation of the ALBA-1 submarine cable, internet access in Cuba has historically been very limited due to a combination of the effects of the U.S. embargo and Cubas domestic policy which has restricted access to the internet. While its search engine was fine, the outage affected Gmail, Google Calendar and YouTube, meaning those at work and those just chilling out were equally as affected. Every year the internet suffers numerous disruptions and outages, and 2021 was no exception. , employees had to manually restart all systems. Sudan is no stranger to shutdowns. If such a rule was misconfigured, or sent out by mistake, it could prevent BGP announcements. While a great deal of work has been done to secure network infrastructure and develop software that can guard against emerging threats, the chances of similar outages happening in the future still exist. The graphic above shows two drops in traffic to AS33651 of Comcast beginning at 22:00 UTC on November 8 and again just before 6:00 UTC the following day. The outage took down Google services, including Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Home apps, and Google Maps. Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai's platform.". There were 10.6 million issues reported worldwide Monday, with the . At the time. What awaited them was cyber-chaos as they discovered many of the world's largest internet services were either down or disrupted to the point of being unusable. Last month, a problem at Comcast, one of the largest internet service providers in the U.S., led to widespread outages. Did we leave any out? Only in December, a power outage at a Manchester-based data centre brought hundreds of businesses to a standstill on one of the busiest traffic days of the year. Ookla, Speedtest, and Speedtest Intelligence are among the federally registered trademarks of Ookla, LLC and may only be used with explicit written permission. That oops resulted in, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced another hours-long outage in. He has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications market with experience of infrastructure and service development with telcos across the globe. The typical cause of a mass outage varies. Signal reported millions of new signups in the wake of the temporary loss of WhatsApp. Honorable mention: Its me, hi, Im the problem, its me. "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled . Fastlys downed services began returning to normal within 50 minutes, which led me to take a glass-half-full perspective on the incident. Cloudflare's automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.". I was also invited on a live BBC World News broadcast to discuss the outage mostly to define CDN for the audience. That was when the government of Uganda cut the countrys internet services in the days around a national presidential election. Whether talking to your friends, doing assignments, watching television or keeping up with the news, we're basically online 24/7 nowadays, and sometimes you can forget how much you rely on the internet. 2006-2023 Ookla, LLC., a Ziff Davis company. On March 10, Russias agency for regulating the countrys communications (Roskomnadzor) attempted to slow traffic to Twitter, but it inadvertently disrupted much of the countrys mobile internet service instead. Getty August 30 was not your typical day for millions of people who took to the internet as usual on a Sunday morning. This outage took place almost 10 years to the day after the internet shutdown in Egypt during the Arab Spring. Countries affected: United Kingdom/global. However, there were no exam-related national outages in Iraq this year. Music streaming . According to Facebooks official explanation, it was a routine maintenance job that took down the entire platform by issuing a command to assess the availability of the global backbone capacity which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally.. Within half an hour, things were deteriorating, with API failures and further glitches complicating things. Countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure. But on October 25, WhatsApps 2 billion users found they were incommunicado and could not send any messages. . Following the protests and outages, there was a push by some U.S. politicians to find a way to provide internet service to the Cuban people via balloon or other unorthodox means. You can see full details of the top 10 on the Ookla site and theres a graphic summary below. During that period, folks had to resort to voice calls to catch up. So when Amazon web services fail, other sites go down with it in this case, that means everybody from Apple to Venmo to Slack suffered the consequences. Windows 10: Microsoft Leaves Active Security Exploit Unfixed-For Two Years! For British Airways customers in May 2017, the situation was far more dire. This is what happened in March 2017, when a simple human error broke the internet. According to Data Center Knowledge, an engineer was debugging an issue when he accidentally mistyped a command. In second place in 2022, just 0.02 million behind Spotify, was indeed that memorable WhatsApp moment, though this was several months later in October. Just a few hours later, CNET reported that Instagram went down too, with people reporting issues accessing the service, sending DMs, or seeing the app crash as soon as they tried to open it. A lack of storage space in Googles authentication tools (what Google later called an internal storage quota issue) caused an error when the system failed to release more space automatically and caused the system to crash. We sometimes joke that a celebrity's actions can "break the internet" it turns out all you actually need is a failure at a content delivery network. This is a BETA experience. During the outage, Downdetector reported spikes in complaints about nearly every company in the internet ecosystem when people could not reach the Facebook platform. Biggest Internet outages 2022 The biggest outage may have had an effect on the aforementioned Spotify Wrapped, because users of the popular music streaming platform were unable to access. WASHINGTON: Downdetector, a site that monitors reports of outages across the internet, said the Facebook service outage is the largest it has ever seen. Your email address will not be published. Global Roblox users had a rough day on May 4, 2022. There were numerous ancillary effects from the loss of the Facebook platform. Lastly, the outage highlighted the confusion that average users have in understanding the difference between their internet service and the apps that run on it. You may opt-out by. While it must be emphasised that such instances are rare, the sudden and unpredictable nature of outages can highlight even the slightest network or security vulnerabilities. Join the UptimeRobot Community on Discord! By Ian Barker Published 5 months ago Follow @IanDBarker No Comments Tweet For the last decade the Downdetector site has been providing data on the real-time status and outages of online services.. Well continue monitoring the worlds largest service disruptions, and be back this time next year with 2023s largest outages. Global Twitter users saw a huge service disruption on July 14, 2022, with over 500,000 users recording issues on Downdetector. An attendee walks past the PlayStation logo in the Sony Interactive Entertainment booth during the Tokyo Game Show 2018 on September 20, 2018 in Chiba, Japan. The company said it would be reviewing its update processes in light of the issue. Notably, but not on this list of biggest outages, Taylor Swift broke the internet a couple of times with the launch of her new album, . and because Dyns outage was so widespread. Even worse, by the time the outage hit on December 22nd, Amazon was still recovering from two, other major outages from earlier in the month all three were, Because of its widespread reach, its almost impossible to calculate the losses caused by the December 22nd outage, but analysts believe it could potentially have cost at least a billion dollars in economic loss to companies that depend on AWS,, If theres anything we can learn from these examples is that downtime can affect everybody even the big players have to deal with outages and the, no doubt that some outages may be unavoidable, its important for any company, no matter the size, to invest in proactive measures like. Within minutes, over half a million users were reporting issues uploading tweets and logging into the service. To rub salt in the wound, the culprit wasnt even Armenian the spade-hacker was conducting her excavation in neighbouring Georgia! So when Amazon web services fail, other sites go down with it in this case, that means everybody from, , when a simple human error broke the internet. According to, when he accidentally mistyped a command. Even worse, by the time the outage hit on December 22nd, Amazon was still recovering from two other major outages from earlier in the month all three were caused by power outages at one of its data centers. Users couldnt load tweets, scroll through the latest news, or let Speedtest know what download speeds they were experiencing for roughly an hour before services got back up and running. This years outages that didnt make our top-10 list included Septembers incident in New Zealand caused by a faulty DDoS attack mitigation and the slow restoration of internet service in New Orleans as the region recovered from Hurricane Ida. Cloudflare said its outage was caused by a "third-party transit provider incident," and CenturyLink later explained there was an IP outage involving firewall and BGP (border gateway protocol, or the routing protocol for the internet) routing that impacted Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Gamers in Europe hoping to unwind their day with some Call of Duty rounds tried to log in without any luck for roughly four hours. Find out what the 10 largest internet outages were on Downdetector during 2022 and learn how the internet was left reeling. > The massive WhatsApp and Instagram outage shows that something has to change. A report issued by Facebook the day after the outage explained that this took time, because these facilities are designed with high levels of physical and system security in mind. Perhaps in another year, a work messaging system going down wouldn't have been that much of a big deal. In a mistake that IT professionals around the world can relate to, they were stung by a bad substring match from a poorly formed regular expression. A global IT crash resulted in the airlines entire fleet being grounded, leaving thousands of passengers stranded over one of the busiest weekends for travel in the UK. Metas WhatsApp came in with the second-worst outage of the year. The outage lasted over an hour and disrupted the midday activities of thousands of remote workers and online students along the East Coast. A similar practice has happened in Iraq since 2015. During the disruption, users couldnt access the service or scroll through influencers photos or slide into any DMs. At first, it looked like there was a connection to secure domain name system (DNS) and denial of service protection provider, Cloudflare. Thought to be the largest DDoS attack in history, the outbreak originated from malware vulnerabilities in a large number of internet-connected devices such as printers, IP cameras and baby monitors. In the end, the Dyn outage cost the business millions in lost revenue. According to the Ponemon Institute, the three most common causes are power supply failure (25%), cybercrime (22%) and accidental human error (22%). There was tentative improvement until most issues were resolved about 3 p.m. Kentik now offers synthetic network monitoring try it today. Is your cybersecurity wrapped up for the holidays? Googles outage in 2020 only lasted 45 minutes, but its considered one of the biggest outages to ever hit the internet, The Guardian reported. One of the biggest distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) to ever hit the internet. A failure of the same cloud-hosted service discovery system on March 8 was the cause of both Spotify and Discord experiencing two of the top three worst outages of the year. Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, has released information on the largest outages seen in 2022. News Summary: For the last decade the Downdetector site has been providing data on the real-time status and outages of online services. Cloudflare, which was also severely impacted, said CenturyLink's outward-propagating issue led to a 3.5% drop in global internet traffic, which would make this one of the biggest internet. And in June, websites around the world were. When the outage happened in 2016, many major companies everybody from Twitter and Spotify to Netflix, Airbnb, Amazon, Spotify, eBay, and the PlayStation Network were using Dyn as their DNS provider, and they all went down with it. Needless to say, the worlds network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021. Can you guess the damage that little 45-minute crash caused? While it was initially attributed to a fiber optic cut in New York City, later it was clarified that the fiber cut was a separate issue. All Rights Reserved. Originating in its US-East-1 data centre, its thought the issue could have been avoided had developers spread their applications over different facilities. Colocation data centres can provide a simple and effective route to greater network resilience. In this post, we look at some of the most notable network outages in recent years, what caused them and how to be prepared in the event of a future reoccurrence. The outage lasted for approximately six hours, and it was caused by what Facebook later called a boring error when configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.. There was a mobile service outage in January that appeared to be government-directed following additional protests motivated by the 27N movement, as well as a complete shutdown for several hours in February. NY 10036. Required fields are marked *. Snapchat users looking to send friends some photo updates were in for a rude reality on July 12, when they experienced a nearly four-hour service issue. Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. On July 22, sites like Amazon, UPS, Airnbnb, the PlayStation Network, Steam and FedEx went down, all thanks to an outage with the Akamai Edge domain name system (DNS) service. Weve seen huge, widespread outages over the years and 2022 was no exception. Major websites and platforms around the world were unavailable for many users on Tuesday morning, including Amazon, CNN, Hulu, Reddit, the New York . This was clearly exemplified in October 2016, when multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeted systems operated by Managed Domain Name Systems (DNS) provider Dyn. Users suffered from the biggest outage ever and that's when they just couldn't stream content like podcasts and music for a staggering two hours. To wrap up the year, the website has shared its list of the 10 biggest internet outages of 2022. The biggest outages of 2022 hindered services from AWS, British Airways, Google, Twitter and more, according to Cisco-owned network intelligence company ThousandEyes. Zuckerberg lost $6 billion from personal wealth in the few hours Facebook was down, according to, The name Fastly might not carry the same weight as Facebook or Amazon for most people out there, but this cloud-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider is behind the, reported that high-traffic websites and online services such as. Meta-owned WhatsApp is one of the most important global messaging services friends, families, and businesses use to keep in touch and connect to the world. While nothing surpassed the biggest outage ever seen, experienced by Meta on October 4, 2021, there have been some significant ones this year. on The Biggest Website Outages of All Time. It's no secret that Internet outages can be frustrating and disruptive, especially when they affect popular platforms and web hosting providers that many people rely on in their daily lives. Microsoft may have given us a reason to switch to Edge with this new feature, Mozilla's Responsible AI Challenge won by tech that protects images from AI, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ending and post-credits scenes explained. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Even Alexa and iRobot reported glitches and connectivity issues. Funnily enough, the bug wasnt triggered at the server or even from the company side it happened when a single customer changed their own setting, accidentally waking up the bug (already in the system but dormant) that led to the outage. 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Egypts shutdown was a watershed moment for the internet community. It signaled the beginning of the era of the large-scale, government-directed internet shutdown that we presently find ourselves in. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. performance management and web application security company that handled things like data traffic management and Domain Name System (DNS) provider. The outage took down Google services, including Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Home apps, and Google Maps. The list of online services that were either inaccessible or severely disrupted on Sunday reads like a who's who of the internet age. A massive computing network in Northern Virginia began to fail after AWS started to make "a relatively small addition of capacity" to the system just before 6 a.m. Eastern time, with the new capacity and an "operating system configuration" setting off a series of errors that caused an outage in the network of servers. Twitter had already suffered two outages earlier in February for what the company called a technical bug that briefly impacted how Tweets were loading, so when it happened again in July, people were less than happy (via The Verge). In the end, the Dyn outage cost the business millions in lost revenue. Meta-owned WattsApp comes next with just 20,000 fewer reports on October 25. By using our website, you agree to the use of cookies as described in our, Kentik named a leader in the GigaOm Radar for Network Observability, 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet. What happened: Its often easy to forget just how interconnected the web is, and how reliant the online information and services we use daily are on shared underlying protocols. New York, "We see an erosion of the global multilateral architecture, unilateral measures, unilateral sanctions becoming the norm," South Africa's envoy tells Newsweek. On October 4th, 2021, Facebook experienced a massive outage that also took down other Meta services such as. Perhaps this should give us hope that common sense might prevail in Syria with respect to these shutdowns. A statement shared to customers read: "Around 6:00 a.m. PST we began to experience packet loss between servers caused by a routing problem between network boundaries on the network of our cloud provider.". Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! (Comcast owns NBC News.) Natural, but almost always wrong as those other recent major outages show. Downtime doesnt only affect shopping and entertainment sites. Beginning on the West Coast and continuing to the East, Comcast users experienced outages lasting anywhere from a few minutes to hours. U.S. Government Says It's Building A 'Virtually Unhackable' Quantum Internet. By completing this form, you agree to our PrivacyPolicy and TermsofUse. As previously mentioned, March 8 was a big day of downed services. The biggest outage may have had an effect on the aforementioned Spotify Wrapped, because users of the popular music streaming platform were unable to access content for up to two hours back in March 2022. Beginning on Monday, November 8, and continuing into the next day, Comcast suffered several large outages affecting thousands of customers across the country. The outage lasted for approximately six hours, and it was caused by, what Facebook later called a boring error, configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication, It might not sound like much, but for a social network that also provides an authentication mechanism for other companies, six hours is an eternity. , the effect of this even extended beyond commercial sites Many colleges in the U.S. had to cancel exams as they couldnt access the platforms where the exams were hosted. 1:01 Monday's outage of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, one of the longest in Facebook's history, marooned billions of users who rely on the social media giant and its apps. The subsequent exchange of internet war stories inspired the creation of the lead-off panel at NANOG 83 entitled Famous Internet Outages. Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman and I were two of the panels four speakers. What's more, in the countdown to the holidays, AWS had two major outages. For the past 10 years, Downdetector has provided critical insights on real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services. Without electricity, internet services were also knocked out, as we observed in Kentik data. Here's the full list It doesn't long to make a. Reddit users flocking to the website to post their newest r/speedtest results found out they wouldnt be able to brag about how fast their speeds were on April 3, with Reddit having major issues for roughly two hours. And while theres no doubt that some outages may be unavoidable, its important for any company, no matter the size, to invest in proactive measures like downtime monitoring to prevent and respond to them as quickly and effectively as possible. 2022's ten biggest outages affected almost 10 million individual users. Amazon, bet365, Blizzard, Cloudflare, Discord, eBay, Garmin, Hulu, PlayStation Network, Reddit, Roblox, Starbucks, Steam, Twitter and Xbox Live were among their number. As of this writing, Comcast has yet to publish an explanation for the outages. Here are 6 great family sagas to watch on Max, Hulu and more, 5 things I want to see on the rumored MacBook Air, New iPhone 15 Pro Max specs leak hints at what's not changing this year, The best tech tutorials and in-depth reviews, Try a single issue or save on a subscription, Issues delivered straight to your door or device. Rounding out the top ten were: Twitter (July 2022, 500,000 users); Call of Duty (August 2022, 350,000 users); Reddit (April 2022, 300,000 users); Snapchat (July 2022, 300,000 users); and the sensation that is TikTok (September 2022, 300,000 users). Some businesses may, however, overlook the physical security aspect, which is equally important. Yet, its only when one of the biggest goes down that you realise just how dependent we are on these cloud behemoths. While Sudan remained connected to the global internet, this shutdown targeted mobile internet services rendering them inoperable for more than 24 days. This one, innocent-looking Google I/O screenshot gives a terrifying glimpse into the future of SEO and online publishing, Google's plans to revamp search with AI just leaked out, HP revenues plummet as printers, PC sales all fall. This happened when in 2017 an outage took down many of the systems and operations for British Airways. Anybody using Facebook to log in to third-party apps was also blocked from these platforms. This year's largest cloud outages were dominated by the three titans in the market: Zoom, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It provides vital but . to prevent and respond to them as quickly and effectively as possible. Users couldnt load tweets, scroll through the latest news, or let. Perhaps an adverse weather event or traffic signalling problems can result in mild confusion and lost hours at the airport terminal. Yet, as pervasive as the internet may be, there are still rare instances where it can be lost for more than a brief moment. On August 30, 2020, a control plane failure at the major global internet service provider (ISP) CenturyLink/Level 3 left it out of action for five hours. Continuing a practice that began in the summer of 2016, the government of Syria ordered internet service cut for 4.5 hours on multiple days while high school final exams were administered. Essentially, Google's internal tools failed to allocate enough storage space for services that handle authentication. (which allows VR headset Oculus users to stream TV, movies, and videos). On January 4, messaging service Slack suffered a major outage in the U.S., the U.K., Japan, India and Germany, on the first day back to work and school for millions. Downdetector will continue to leverage over 25 million monthly reports from individual users, real-time analysis, and verification of outage reports, and make sure you have reliable information about the status of services that are important to you. While Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay may provide us with a look back at our listening habits, outage tracker Downdetector has also given its data of the biggest Internet outages of 2022. According to The Wolfcast, the Outage may have cost digital platforms up to $150 million in lost sales for just one hour of offline time. The issue was caused by a failure in the company's authentication tools, which manage how users log in to services run by both Google and third-party developers. According to, s summary of the event, that single, innocent change caused, Outage may have cost digital platforms up to $150 million in lost sales. Adding world-class digital and physical security provides an extra layer of defence against emerging threats, whether malicious or otherwise. Rounding out the top 10 are: Roblox, Instagram, Twitter, Call of Duty, Reddit, Snapchat and TikTok. A vote which resulted in the re-election of President Museveni, extending his 36-year rule over the East African country. , over 1,000 flights were grounded, terminals in London were overflowed with 75,000 stranded passengers, and access to the booking system and baggage handling were affected. :-). "We've pulled in every resource available to resolve the outage as soon as we are able," the company said. According to Kentik data, Fastly saw a 75% drop in traffic volume during the outage. Because of its widespread reach, its almost impossible to calculate the losses caused by the December 22nd outage, but analysts believe it could potentially have cost at least a billion dollars in economic loss to companies that depend on AWS, TFIR says. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla. Dyn cyberattack (2016) Countries affected: United States and Europe Impact: Millions of users of popular sites including Airbnb, Amazon, BBC, CNN, eBay, Netflix and Twitter What happened: It's. On June 8, some of the world's biggest news websites including CNN, the New Yotrk Times and CNN were taken down, as well as Amazon, Target, Twitch, Spotify, Pinterest, Hulu, Reddit and the U.K. government website, when cloud service provider Fastly suffered an outage. We put together a list of the 10 biggest global outages of 2022, so read on to learn how outages affected users:. U.S. TikTok users looking to find the latest dance crazes on TikTok awoke early in the morning on September 15 to some tough news: TikTok was down globally. As The Verge reported later, it took about 2two hours before things started to come back online just as Google Cloud (the service provider both Spotify and Discord operate on) announced they had their own glitch due to a malfunctioning component that required a reroute. On December 14, 2020, many realised how much they depend on Google services when the company suffered a worldwide outage that lasted about 45 minutes. ET and service was still sporadic two and a half hours later. On February 1, the Myanmar military seized control of the country through a coup dtat and ordered a shutdown of most of the countrys internet services for several hours. August 30 was not your typical day for millions of people who took to the internet as usual on a Sunday morning. As an avid bargain-hunter, you can be sure that any deal Craig finds is top value! In this photo illustration, the logos of the applications, Google Maps, Google and Gmail are displayed on the screen of a tablet on October 23, 2018 in Paris, France. And now the world's network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021. In this post, I run through 10 of the top outages that we covered in 2021. It might not sound like much, but for a social network that also provides an authentication mechanism for other companies, six hours is an eternity. And now the worlds network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021. What happened: It seems almost unfair to single AWS out here, as nearly every cloud platform has suffered some form of outage in recent years. NY 10036. Its therefore essential that businesses and providers do their due diligence in preparing for them. John Graham-Cumming, the Cloudflare CTO, told me via email today that : "Yesterday we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers. And because of its size, no other company out there loses more money every time its website goes down. Nearly 300,000 users flocked to Downdetector to report issues with accessing the website, but luckily the issue seemed to be resolved in a few hours. Fastly supports news sites and apps . In this photo illustration the logo of US online social media and social networking service Facebook (C), the US instant messaging software Whatsapp's logo (L) and the US social network Instagram's logo (C) are displayed on a smartphone screen on October 05, 2021 in Glastonbury, England. This was even worse for Facebook because staff were using the same network to access the network remotely. WhatsApp has over 2 billion users, so the furor over the major disruption experienced by customers on October 25 was huge - people suddenly couldn't send any messages at all, and 2,9 million issues were reported in about two hours. Intending to block Twitters link shortener t.co, Russia blocked traffic associated with all domains containing t.co, for example, Microsoft.com and Reddit.com. She first disrupted services on Spotify with the October 21 midnight launch of her album for a very brief moment. Quinn Rooney/Getty Images. The ISP is supposed to keep other sites up and running, but as it peers with providers and enterprises including Cloudflare, Google, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Discord, Hulu and OpenTable, this led to a huge worldwide outage being felt by millions of internet users across the United States and Europe. While no outage in 2022 eclipsed the biggest outage weve ever seen, which, when Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, 2022 still saw some big worldwide outages. Michael Rabinowitz is director of marketing & strategy, connectivity at Interxion. This was not a Cloudflare-specific outage. Perhaps it is natural to jump to such a conclusion when faced with such a widespread internet outage. Before restoring services on November 18, Sudanese military forces violently cracked down on anti-coup protesters in the streets of Khartoum. Theyre hard to get into, and once youre inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them (as reported via Market Watch). According to Fastlys summary of the event, that single, innocent change caused 85% of their network to return errors. In a blog post, I posed the question of how the departure would impact the Afghan domestic internet, which had grown dramatically in the past decade. That was i, t a simple click of the wrong key took down the cloud for several hours and caused headaches for many companies. For the last decade the Downdetector site has been providing data on the real-time status and outages of online services. Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, has released information on the largest outages seen in 2022. In this Photo illustration, a screen displays a holding page of the Gov.UK Government website portal on June 08, 2021 in London, England. That was the obscure ASN that appeared out of nowhere in the final seconds of the previous administration and started announcing more IPv4 space than any ASN in history leading to headlines in the Washington Post and Associated Press. In a statement, it added: "We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.". A month later, the British Airways owner estimated the data center outage cost the company about $102 million between lost revenue and the expense of compensating thousands of passengers, according to Data Center Knowledge. Another two-per-one outage hit Twitter and Instagram on the same day in July 2022, but with a twist . It doesnt long to make a huge impact when it comes to internet outages. While no outage in 2022 eclipsed the biggest outage weve ever seen, which Meta experienced on October 4, 2021 when Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, 2022 still saw some big worldwide outages. While users couldnt send pictures of themselves with Snapchats newest filters, they did record over 300,000 reports on Downdetector. In the days following the blackout, Dutton surveyed 250 pager users in Los Angeles and . March 8 marked a giant worldwide outage for both Discord and Spotify going down around the same time. He is also passionate about cars and the decarbonisation of personal transportation. What it wasn't, despite plenty of rumors to the contrary, was a massive cyber-attack. Kentik's Doug Madory recaps the top 10. Downdetector recorded over 300,000 user reports during this period to land on our top 10 biggest outages list. Kentiks Doug Madory recaps the top 10. More precisely, a "bad Flowspec rule." When Amazon Paused the World-Wide-Web Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had its fair share of cloud outages in the past, with 2021 scheduling more than 27 outages. Despite our best efforts, outages will happen and we should take comfort in the speed at which Fastly was able to restore their services following the disruption. Ooklas data-driven articles and interactive content provide insight into network and connectivity performance around the globe. People trying to access these sites, plus others including American Express, Delta Airlines and Home Depot, were met with a DNS error message. Okay, so it was not quite within the last year, but it would be remiss not to include it. Competition for the largest worldwide outage was extremely tight this year, with Spotify edging out Meta-owned WhatsApp by about 20,000 reports on Downdetector at just over 2.9 million reports. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. After initially welcoming the hordes of Facebook refugees, Twitter began to feel the crunch as one of the few remaining social media options. Unlucky users had to sit with themselves during this outage and ponder, AITA?, Global Twitter users saw a huge service disruption on July 14, 2022, with over 500,000 users recording issues on Downdetector. A whole other beaver was also to blame for a similar internet outage in April 2021, when close to 900 residents found themselves without service for most of a day in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. July 14, 2022 was a busy day for social media companies. Syria experienced multiple hours-long national internet blackouts in May and June as part of an ongoing effort to combat cheating on student exams. As a result, hundreds of popular websites were taken offline for hours, bringing chaos to users and costing businesses millions in lost revenue. Facebook Workplace, the internal communications platform used by its staff, was also down, while access cards used by staff to enter the offices were reportedly dependent on the internal systems working. And in what sounds like one of those movies where. Although there arent specific numbers available about the losses, CoverLink points out that organizations spend an average of $2.5 million recovering from DDoS attacks and because Dyns outage was so widespread, it likely cost a lot more than that. In 1998, as many as 90% of the 50 million pagers in the US stopped working because of a satellite failure. On October 4, the worlds largest social media platform suffered a global outage of all of its services for nearly six hours, during which time Facebook and its subsidiaries, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus, were unavailable. Lasting for roughly two hours, the WhatsApp outage notched nearly 2.9 million issue reports on Downdetector, placing it as runner-up on our list for Downdetectors biggest outage of the year., Competition for the largest worldwide outage was extremely tight this year, with Spotify edging out Meta-owned WhatsApp by about 20,000 reports on Downdetector at just over 2.9 million reports. Funnily enough, the bug wasnt triggered at the server or even from the company side it happened when a single customer changed their own setting, accidentally waking up the bug (already in the system but dormant) that led to the outage. The knock on commercial effects of such occurrences can be catastrophic for both providers and business customers. Marco Rubio Is Furious. As much as we all love the internet and everything it offers, weve also all experienced that sinking feeling when we try to access our favorite website, only to find its down. She first disrupted services on Spotify with the October 21 midnight launch of her album for a very brief moment. Theyd be lost without it. By the time Instagram was back up, many large accounts had lost millions of followers, reports Lifestyle Asia. Many online services use AWS's cloud services. Network were using Dyn as their DNS provider, and they all went down with it. TechRadar is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. And heres some irony for you Instagram users flocked to Twitter to report Instagram outages as soon as they started. Cloudflare was just another victim this time around, albeit one that had a knock-on effect in disrupting other services. With a claimed 3.5 billion users of its combined services, Facebooks downtime of at least five and a half hours comes to more than 1.2 trillion person-minutes of service unavailability, a so-called 1.2 tera-lapse, or the largest communications outage in history. Back in February, my friend John Kristoff kicked off a lively discussion on the NANOG listserv by asking subscribers to rank their top three most famous internet outages. As the sheer scale of the internet down event started to reveal itself, with a 3.5% drop in global traffic, speculation mounted as to whether a cyber-attack was to blame. Updated August 31 with a statement by the Cloudflare CTO. While the outage only lasted about two hours, Discord users logged over 1.1 million reports on Downdetector while they waited patiently for the messaging service to come back online. Really useful USB-C + USB-A charger for home/work and travel. This year we documented outages, including multiple government-directed shutdowns, as well as what might be the internets biggest outage in history. An IT maintenance contractor accidentally switched off an uninterruptable power supply at a key data centre, damaging the server during the subsequent power surge. We put together a list of the 10 biggest global outages of 2022, so read on to learn how outages affected users:, Reddit users flocking to the website to post their newest, results found out they wouldnt be able to brag about how fast their speeds were on April 3, with Reddit having major issues for roughly two hours. Be sure to check out, WWDC 2023: Heres the new hardware Apple is expected to announce, watchOS 10 to include revamped apps to take advantage of Apple Watch Ultras larger display, 15-inch MacBook Air: Everything we know ahead of WWDC, Apple preps first Mac with M2 Ultra chip and M2 Max desktop ahead of WWDC. But despite affecting slightly over 2.9 million users, the incident comes nowhere near 2021s largest outage, when more than 10.6 million Meta users were left without access after an issue in October 2021. Even worse, because. Rob Savage is about to hit cinemas in a big way with his adaptation of Stephen King 's short story, The Boogeyman. reported that it started with smaller issues around 1 pm, with users unable to log in and support pages glitching. Visit our corporate site. At the time, Mashable reported that it started with smaller issues around 1 pm, with users unable to log in and support pages glitching. The country has sadly experienced numerous blackouts in recent years, starting as far back as an incident in September 2013, as well as blackouts this summer to prevent student cheating on exams. Slack pinned the source of the issue on network scaling issues by the AWS Transit Gateway, which didn't scale fast enough to accommodate the spike in demand for Slack's services as millions returned to work and school after the holidays. That issue seemed to linger for some users for many hours, with users recording over 700,000 reports on Downdetector over the course of the incident. The decline of prefixes originated by AS5800, the primary ASN used by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan, mirrors the troop drawdown. As far as Spotify is concerned, the competition was huge and we saw the world's largest worldwide outage take place. Perhaps even scarier is the fact that it can also disrupt transportation. Additionally, there are numerous unresolved challenges to what I termed a Hollywood scenario in the Washington Post. By colocating, a business can have multiple points of presence across different facilities, meaning less reliance on any single data centre being fully operational. One of the biggest distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) to ever hit the internet. Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, Its especially worrisome that, from this, other embattled authoritarian regimes may draw the conclusion that shutdowns work, given the presidents re-election. Close-up of logo on facade at headquarters of cyber security company Cloudflare in the South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood of San Francisco, California, June 10, 2019. PS5 fell to 9th place with 49 outages, with one of the biggest problems reported by users being unable to log in (64%). The continuing Facebook outage on Monday became the largest ever documented by Down Detector, according to Speedtest by Ookla. (Comcast owns NBC News.) During this issue, frustrated users around the world recorded over 350,000 issues with the game while they waited for the service to come back online. Top 7 Cloud Outages in 2021 1. AWS later explained that the outage was caused by its attempts to add new servers to its network. Source: Shutterstock This collaboration culminated in a paper published in August in SIGCOMMs 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet. In the middle of the first Covid-19 pandemic winter, the Verizon Fios service suffered a major outage. While shutdowns are new to Cuba in 2021, Julys outage wasnt the first. The third-party transit provider turned out to be CenturyLink, a Fortune 500 Louisiana based telecommunication company providing connectivity, cloud and security solutions. Third place was awarded to Discord in March 2022 (1.1 million users), with fourth and fifth taken by Roblox (May 2022, 700,000 users) and Instagram (July 2022, 600,000 users). Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: Michael is an editor for 9to5Mac. But given that Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram, an outage at the social network can be catastrophic for communication. And users accustomed to authenticating via Facebook for various apps or websites were unable to access them. From the major Spotify outage in March to the widespread impact of the WhatsApp incident in October, these outages affected millions of users and disrupted their access to essential online services. What awaited them was cyber-chaos as they discovered many of the world's. The name Fastly might not carry the same weight as Facebook or Amazon for most people out there, but this cloud-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider is behind the content delivery of major companies around the world. On the following day, the Open Observatory documented blockages of social media that continued throughout the week. Amazon has had its share of outages over the years. The outages began at 1:00 UTC (4am local) and lasted until 5:30 UTC (8:30am local) during which time the exams were physically distributed around the country. Let us know. A widespread internet outage caused several major websites to shut down Thursday afternoon, including Amazon, Delta, Capital One and Costco. By the time Instagram was back up, many large accounts had lost, The main issue with Amazon going down is that Amazons S3 web-based storage service provides cloud services for a lot of other sites out there. UptimeRobot is excellent, Simple, and easy to use. Its often said partly with tongue in cheek - that if Maslows famous hierarchy of human needs were revised today, internet connectivity would feature at its foundation. News sites like The Washington Post, product providers like Adobe and workplace tools like Trello were knocked out due to the outage, which lasted a number of hours. The scariest horror movie according to a scientific study at least! Heres how it works. According to Kentik data, Verizon experienced a 12% drop in traffic volume nationally while the service was down. Twitter went down for 40 minutes in the early morning of July 14th, 2022. A wide range of major websites including eBay, Paypal, The Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and The Guardian were taken offline due to what is believed to be an issue with the Fastly cloud hosting service. Spotify, the popular music streaming portal, had the biggest outage of the year that day, with users unable to stream their favorite music and podcasts for nearly two hours.. Perhaps most notable among the 2022 results were the issues affecting social media platforms, which made up 70% of the largest outages. Spotify just edged out WhatsApp by about 20,000 reports at over 2.9 million. Perhaps even more bizarre is that some were left sitting in the dark and the cold as their Google Home apps and Nest services were left inoperable. During the coming months, disruptions to Myanmars internet ran the gamut: a total shutdown of all services, nightly internet blockages, extended shutdown of mobile internet services, and even a leaked BGP hijack of Twitter. that took down a big chunk of the Internet for most of the Eastern seaboard, . The attack overwhelmed the companys servers, spreading malware vulnerabilities in basic equipment like. When an engineer accidentally disconnected the power supply to British Airways data center, a major outage followed, causing disruption to BAs global operations. Sites affected included Quora, Business Insider and Slack, among others. has provided critical insights on real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services. However, as was the case on June 15, when mobile carriers and internet services across the U.S. went down, or the event that led to large swathes of the internet going dark on July 17, the reality was far more mundane. One of the biggest internet outages ever happened on Sunday, but what caused it? A statement read: "Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations. Februarys freeze that knocked out electricity for millions of customers in Texas also led to power outages impacting 4.7 million people in northern Mexico. Downdetector recorded over 300,000 user reports during this period to land on our top 10 biggest outages list. More. The cause of the crash? Peter Micek of Access Now and I co-wrote a blog post stressing that the campaign to combat shutdowns is far from over and needs more support. Can you guess the damage that little 45-minute crash caused? Over the past year, there's been a number of website outages that have left us scrambling. According to The Guardian, over 1,000 flights were grounded, terminals in London were overflowed with 75,000 stranded passengers, and access to the booking system and baggage handling were affected. Exclusive: U.S. States Are Flying Thousands Of Chinese Drones Across The East Coast. 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