Recent Major Technology Failures: A List of Global Disruptions Across Sectors

The global technology outage has disrupted businesses across sectors, affecting airlines, broadcasters, banking and healthcare services on Friday. Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said it is working with customers affected by a flaw discovered in a Microsoft Windows update.

Here are the biggest failures in recent years:

British Airways – May 2017

In May 2017, British Airways experienced a major computer system failure that left 75,000 passengers stranded on a plane over the long bank holiday weekend. The disruption, attributed to an accidental power outage by a maintenance contractor, caused major public relations problems for the airline.

Alphabet – December 2020

Google services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive, experienced an hour-long outage on December 14, 2020. The outage affected more than 12,000 YouTube users worldwide, with significant impacts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.

Fastly – June 2021

In June 2021, a widespread outage involving US cloud computing company Fastly affected thousands of government, news and social media sites around the world. High-traffic sites such as Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify and the New York Times experienced disruptions lasting from several 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 briefly went down due to server issues at content delivery network provider Akamai. The problem was caused by a bug in the company’s software.

Finish – October 2021

Meta’s platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were unavailable for six hours on October 4, 2021. The outage, which affected 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 around the world were unable to access the platform or use its features for several hours. Downdetector reported more than 10,000 affected users in the U.S., about 2,500 in Japan, and 2,500 in the U.K. at the peak of the disruption.

(Based on information from Reuters)