An issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has caused a global cyber blackout which affected airlines, communication systems, banks and hospitals in several countries.
These online system outages usually happen when a service or platform used by many different companies experiences a problem.
This Friday (19), the CrowdStrike platform called Falcon, used by several large corporations to detect and prevent hacker threats, presented a defect in a content update on Microsoft Windows operating systems — which caused the interruption in the system of companies around the world that use the antivirus.
These outages remind us that even large companies, which seem so solid, are subject to technology failures. And this is not the first time they have happened.
What were the biggest internet outages in history?
Goal, October 2021
On October 4, 2021, Meta’s services — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — went down after major instability on the company’s platform.
The apps were down for six hours after an error that, according to the Goaloccurred because “configuration changes in the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused problems that interrupted this communication.”
As the failure also affected the company itself, employees had to manually restart systems and even had problems accessing the building and the hardware needed for the fix.
The Meta blackout was so long that conspiracy theories began to circulate on social media, giving rise to several memes.
Fastly, June 2021
Fastly is a cloud-based content delivery network (CDN) provider. And while its name may not be well-known, the companies that use its services are.
The failure caused an outage of around an hour on websites such as Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, several newspapers and news portals, and even the official website of the UK government.
According to the companythe failure occurred due to an undetected bug that was activated after one of the customers changed their own system settings, which ended up affecting 85% of Fastly’s network.
British Airways, May 2017
In 2017, a British Airways systems outage caused flight delays worldwide, affecting more than 75,000 people. All flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports were cancelled on 27 May, and the company’s website and call centres also went down.
The failure was caused after a power outage, which was accidentally turned off by one of the company’s employees, according to Reuters.
Google, December 2020
The outage of Google’s systems may have lasted 45 minutes, but its impact was felt worldwide. All of the company’s services were affected, including Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and more.
According to the companythere was a problem with storage space in Google authentication tools because the system failed to automatically free up more space when needed.
Dyn, October 2016
The company, which deals with application security and performance management, is also the provider of domain name systems (DNS) for several large corporations.
On October 21, 2016, when Dyn’s system went down, the companies that used its DNS also went down: Spotify, Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, Amazon, Spotify, PlayStation, among others.
In this case, the problem was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack — in which attackers overload a server with malicious traffic, crashing the system — which became one of the largest in history.
Understand the global cyber failure that affected flights, banks and hospitals
See photos of the cyber blackout around the world
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
