People dealing with their shares and stocks got the shock of their lives when NSE servers went down and stopped updating the numbers.?
It led to a massive uproar with people either reacting to the losses they incurred due to this mishap or were making fun of NSE. Regardless, for a brief moment, Twitter became a bit more entertaining.?
However, crashes like these, albeit catastrophic, aren¡¯t uncommon. And they can be caused by a variety of reasons -- it could either be due to cyber attacks on the company¡¯s hardware, physical damage to the server hardware itself as well as human error, among a bunch of other reasons.?
Here are some of the major crashes in recent history that made the lives of people hell, for a brief period.?
One of the darkest phases in Sony Playstation¡¯s history was the cyberattack in 2011 that forced the Japanese giant to shut its online multiplayer services for its 77 million-plus users. The outage was caused by DDoS attacks by hacker ¡®Anonymous¡¯ who was upset with Sony¡¯s legal action against George Geohot Hotz who figured out ways to run pirated games on the PS3.
The attack shut down the PSN network for nearly 23 days, while also putting confidential data such as user ID, game saves and even saved credit card information at risk. While services began fine on 14th May, analysts predicted that this ordeal cost Sony a whopping $250 million.?
This crash affected individuals across two continents -- the United States and Europe, while affecting the functioning of popular platforms such as Airbnb, Amazon, BBC, CNN, eBay, Netflix, and Twitter. Multiple DDoS attacks targeted systems under Managed Domain Name Systems (DNS) service provider Dyn.?
It is regarded as one of the largest DDoS attacks in history. The attack originated from malware vulnerabilities in a large number of internet-connected devices like printers, IP cameras etc. This forced several websites to take their operations offline, costing them millions in revenue.?
In 2017, a massive IT crash grounded the entire British Airways fleet, affecting travel plans of thousands of passengers not just in the UK, but around the world who were planning to board a British Airways flight.?
This crash was caused after an IT maintenance contractor accidentally switched off an ¡®uninterruptible power supply at one of the data centres that destroyed the server with the power surge.??
WhatsApp is loved by billions of people around the world so it is fair to say that any outage with this texting app could cause quite a chaos -- and it did. In 2017, WhatsApp faced an outage that lasted over two hours. Oddly, WhatsApp didn¡¯t inform its users about the outage on their official Twitter handle and haven¡¯t actually stated what really went wrong, even to this day.?
In November of 2017, the popular image sharing platform experienced an outage of over 4 hours. The outage didn¡¯t allow users to log onto the platform with an error stating ¡®could not connect¡¯. Reports at the time revealed that the app had been facing severe issues since October 2017. The crash affected over 1.8 million users around the world, according to DownDetector.
Another massive server crash in 2017, ?this time by Amazon Web Services or AWS. This occurred after Amazon¡¯s S3 web storage service started experiencing crazy error rates that caused partial or full outages for several websites including publications like Business Insider, even Quora and Slack and its users around the world. This originated in AWS¡¯s US-East-1 data centre.?
Microsoft is one of the many companies that enable apps to run efficiently on its Azure cloud servers. However, on June 20, 2018 things went south for the massive cloud company.?
In a nightmarish scenario, a human error at Microsoft¡¯s data centres in Dublin, Ireland, resulting in an outage that lasted a whopping eleven hours. Luckily, the issues surfaced at the end of business hours so the damage it caused wasn¡¯t as catastrophic?
In 2019, we saw the world get disconnected from Wikipedia sites for a whole nine hours. The cause was a massive DDoS attack. In case you didn¡¯t know, a DDoS attack can cause immense strain on the web infrastructure of the target while also congesting networks, resulting in severe packet loss. The site saw a packet loss of up to 60 percent from several nations across the world.?
While Facebook and its services have experienced numerous outages over the years, the one that occurred on March 13, 2019 was definitely one of the worst ever experienced in the world, affecting 7.5 million users according to DownDetector. Downdetector showed people affected for over a day and a half with Facebook services.?
Facebook services including Instagram and WhatsApp were down in North America and Europe as well as throughout South America and the Asia Pacific region.?
In December 2020, we saw Google services crash, causing a global outage of popular services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet and others -- all this when several people were working from home during the pandemic.?
An investigation later revealed that this was caused due to an internal storage quota issue. Basically, the system that would allocate storage for each of Google¡¯s services malfunctioned, reaching the threshold of its storage capacity. The blackout lasted for a good 45 minutes before everything was back online.?