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\n <\/div>\n Facebook, October 2021\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n
On October 4th, 2021, Facebook experienced a massive outage that also took down other Meta services such as <\/span>WhatsApp<\/b>, <\/span>Instagram<\/b>, <\/span>Messenger<\/b>, and <\/span>Oculus Quest<\/b> (which allows VR headset Oculus users to stream TV, movies, and videos).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The outage lasted for approximately six hours, and it was caused by <\/span>what Facebook later called a boring error<\/span><\/a> when \u201c<\/span>configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication<\/span><\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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. Even worse, because<\/span> the outage also took down the tools used to reset the routers handling traffic<\/b>, employees had to manually restart all systems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And in what sounds like one of those movies where<\/span> everything goes wrong, employees could not, at first, even access the building where the data centers were located to debug the issue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A report issued by Facebook the day after the outage explained that \u201c<\/span>this took time, because these facilities are designed with high levels of physical and system security in mind. They\u2019re hard to get into, and once you\u2019re inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them<\/span><\/i>\u201d (as reported via <\/span>Market Watch<\/span><\/a>). By the time all was said and done, the outage had <\/span>cost<\/b> Facebook<\/span><\/a> roughly $60 million<\/b> in ad revenue and $47.3 billion in lost market cap. Zuckerberg lost $6 billion from personal wealth in the few hours Facebook was down, according to <\/span>Bloomberg<\/span><\/a>.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>content delivery of major companies around the world<\/b>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When the 1-hour outage hit in 2021, <\/span>CNBC<\/span><\/a> reported that high-traffic websites and online services such as <\/span>Amazon<\/b>, <\/span>Reddit<\/b>, <\/span>The New York Times<\/b>, <\/span>Shopify<\/b>, <\/span>Twitter<\/b>, <\/span>Spotify<\/b>, and even the <\/span>UK government’s<\/b> official website all went down, displayed error messages or experience on-and-off difficulties. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The outage was caused by a software bug within the company\u2019s CDN configuration.\u00a0 Funnily enough, the bug wasn\u2019t triggered at the server or even from the company side \u2013 it happened when a single customer changed their own setting, accidentally \u201cwaking up\u201d the bug (already in the system but dormant) that led to the outage. According to <\/span>Fastly<\/span><\/a>\u2019s summary of the event, that single, innocent change caused <\/span>85% of their network to return errors<\/b>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n According to <\/span>The Wolfcast<\/span><\/a>, the \u201c<\/span>Outage may have cost digital platforms up to $150 million in lost sales<\/span><\/i>\u201d \u2013 for just one hour of offline time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Downtime doesn\u2019t only affect shopping and entertainment sites. Perhaps even scarier is the fact that it can also disrupt transportation. This happened when in 2017 an outage took down many of the systems and operations for British Airways.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When an <\/span>engineer accidentally disconnected the power supply to British Airway\u2019s data center,<\/b> a major outage followed, causing <\/span>disruption to BA\u2019s global operations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n According to <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/a>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n A month later, the British Airways owner estimated the data center outage <\/span>cost the company about $102 million<\/b> between lost revenue and the expense of compensating thousands of passengers, according to <\/span>Data Center Knowledge<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When a giant like Google goes down, <\/span>the entire world feels the impact<\/b>. Google\u2019s outage in 2020 only lasted 45 minutes, but it\u2019s considered one of the biggest outages to ever hit the internet, <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/a> reported.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The outage took down Google services, including <\/span>Gmail<\/b>, <\/span>Google Drive<\/b>, <\/span>YouTube<\/b>, <\/span>Google Calendar<\/b>, <\/span>Google Home apps<\/b>, and <\/span>Google Maps<\/b>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The cause of the crash?<\/span> A <\/span>lack of storage space in Google\u2019s authentication tools<\/b> (what Google later called \u201can internal storage quota issue\u201d) caused an error when the system failed to release more space automatically and caused the system to crash.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Can you guess the damage that little 45-minute crash caused? <\/span>Google lost <\/span>$1.7M in ad revenue<\/b> during the YouTube outage, according to <\/span>Fox Business<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Between 2001 and 2017, Dyn was an <\/span>Internet<\/span><\/a> performance management and web application security company that handled things like data traffic management and\u00a0 Domain Name System (DNS) provider.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When the outage happened in 2016, many major companies \u2013 everybody from <\/span>Twitter<\/b> and <\/span>Spotify<\/b> to <\/span>Netflix<\/b>, <\/span>Airbnb<\/b>, <\/span>Amazon<\/b>, <\/span>Spotify<\/b>, <\/span>eBay<\/b>, and the <\/span>PlayStation<\/b> Network \u2013 were using Dyn as their DNS provider, and they all went down with it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The cause behind the outage? One of the biggest distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) to ever hit the internet. <\/span>Wired<\/span><\/a> called it the DDoS attack \u201c<\/span>that took down a big chunk of the Internet for most of the Eastern seaboard<\/span><\/i>.\u201d The attack overwhelmed the company\u2019s servers, spreading malware vulnerabilities in basic equipment like <\/span>printers<\/b> and <\/span>IP cameras<\/b>. <\/span>Later reports <\/span>identified the attack as the<\/span> largest of its kind in history<\/b> (via <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the end, the Dyn outage cost the business millions in lost revenue. Although there aren\u2019t specific numbers available about the losses, <\/span>CoverLink<\/span><\/a> points out that \u201c<\/span>organizations spend an average of $2.5 million recovering from DDoS attacks\u201d <\/span><\/i>and because Dyn\u2019s outage was so widespread, <\/span>it likely cost a lot more than that<\/b>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Both Spotify and Discord suffered interruptions in service in March 2022. At the time, <\/span>Mashable<\/span><\/a> reported that it started with smaller issues around 1 pm, with users unable to log in and support pages glitching.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Within half an hour, things were deteriorating, with API failures and further glitches complicating things. As <\/span>The Verge<\/span><\/a> reported later, it took about 2two hours before things started to come back online \u2014 just as <\/span>Google Cloud<\/b> (the <\/span>service provider both Spotify and Discord operate on<\/span>) announced they had their own glitch due to a malfunctioning component that required a reroute.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another two-per-one outage hit Twitter and Instagram on the same day in July 2022, but with a twist \u2013 <\/span>the outages weren\u2019t actually connected<\/b>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Twitter went down for 40 minutes<\/span><\/a> in the early morning of July 14th, 2022. Within minutes, over half a million users were reporting issues uploading tweets and logging into the service.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Twitter had already suffered two outages earlier in February for what the company called \u201c<\/span>a technical bug that briefly impacted how Tweets were loading,<\/span><\/i>\u201d so when it happened again in July, people were less than happy (via <\/span>The Verge<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n About an hour later, however, Twitter was back up and running from \u201c<\/span>some trouble with internal systems<\/span><\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Just a few hours later, <\/span>CNET<\/span><\/a> 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. <\/span>And here\u2019s some irony for you \u2013Instagram users flocked to Twitter to report Instagram outages as soon as they started.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Instagram was up again within a couple of hours, only to suffer <\/span>another major outage<\/b> in October 2022. This time, it wasn\u2019t just a question of crashes and difficulty accessing the app, but accounts were accidentally locked and suspended because of a bug. By the time Instagram was back up, many large accounts had lost <\/span>millions of followers<\/b>, reports <\/span>Lifestyle Asia<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/uptimerobot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/biggest-outage-1-1024x523.png\")
Fastly, June 8th, 2021<\/b><\/h2>\n
British Airways, May 28th, 2017\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n
Google, December 14th, 2020<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/uptimerobot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/biggest-outage-2-1024x523.png\")
Dyn, October 21st, 2016<\/b><\/h2>\n
Spotify and Discord, March 8, 2022<\/b><\/h2>\n
Twitter and Instagram <\/b>July 14, 2022<\/b><\/h2>\n