6 of the biggest tech outages in recent years

A global tech outage was disrupting operations across multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off air and services from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said it was working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts.

Read: CrowdStrike CEO: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack”

Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:

British Airways

IAG-owned British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future. According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.

Read: Microsoft outage GCC update: DXB, Emirates, Etihad say flights on schedule

Alphabet

Some of Google’s most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the US, UK and India.

Fastly

In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.

Akamai

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.

META

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

Read: Microsoft says its 365 outage issues fixed

X Corp

Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

DownDetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the US, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Read: Microsoft global outage: Major banks, airlines and media impacted