Tech Outages: A Recap of Recent Disruptions

Amazon's AWS experienced a major outage, impacting global websites and apps. This incident is one of several significant tech outages in recent years, including disruptions at British Airways, Google, Fastly, Akamai, Meta, and Twitter. These outages affected customers worldwide, leading to operational backlogs and public relations challenges.

Amazon's cloud services unit, AWS, faced a significant outage on Monday, disrupting major websites and apps worldwide. This represents the first major internet disruption since the CrowdStrike malfunction last year.

Recent years have seen several major tech outages: In May 2017, British Airways encountered a computer system failure, stranding 75,000 passengers and causing a public relations debacle attributed to a mishap by a maintenance contractor who inadvertently switched off power.

Google services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive, were down for an hour on December 14, 2020, affecting over 12,000 users globally. June 2021 saw thousands of websites hit by an outage related to Fastly. Similarly, server-related glitches at Akamai in June 2021 and a configuration change at Meta in October 2021 resulted in temporary service disruptions. In December 2022, Twitter faced an outage impacting tens of thousands of users worldwide. A CrowdStrike software update caused system issues in July 2024, impacting services globally.

(With inputs from agencies.)