Articles about Outage

This time last week businesses around the world were rocked by major disruption as a faulty update to the CrowdStrike security software brought down Windows systems.

The company has now issued a preliminary report into the incident which reveals that a 'Rapid Response Content' configuration update caused the problem.

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You'll doubtless be aware already of the major outages of Microsoft systems today causing problems for airports, rail operators, banks, retailers, broadcasters and more.

Among the disruption stores found themselves unable to accept payments and in the UK Sky News’s breakfast show was taken off air. Some airports were forced to use whiteboards to show flight departure information.

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Throughout 2023, the tech world witnessed several high-profile outages. Collectively, these incidents cost millions of dollars, and affected tens of millions of end users. Luckily, these negative impacts were not all in vain -- outages like these serve as cautionary tales for organizations as they face the ongoing challenge of maintaining seamless operations in increasingly complex, interdependent environments. 

Reflecting on these incidents helps us see how we can safeguard against similar disruptions happening in the future. In this article, we’ll delve into four major types of outages, with lessons to help companies enhance their resilience in 2024 and beyond.

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If you've visited Twitter this morning you may have found that the platform appears to have forgotten that you exist.

Users around the world are being presented with a friendly 'Welcome to Twitter' message urging them to find some people to follow, despite having been on Twitter for years and already following hundreds of people.

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For the last decade the Downdetector site has been providing data on the real-time status and outages of online services.

Ookla, the company behind Downdetector, has released information on the largest outages seen in 2022. While nothing surpassed the biggest outage ever seen, experienced by Meta on October 4, 2021, there have been some significant ones this year.

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The average cost of an IT Outage is $12,913 per minute according to a new report from AIOps automation specialist BigPanda.

Produced in conjunction with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), the report also finds a correlation between IT outage costs and the size of an organization, as businesses with more than 20,000 employees lose an average of $25,402 per minute due to outages, translating to more than $1.5 million per hour.

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The latest Outage Analysis report released by the Uptime Institute reveals that the digital infrastructure sector is struggling to achieve a measurable reduction in outage rates and severity.

One in five organizations report experiencing a 'serious' or 'severe' outage (involving significant financial losses, reputational damage, compliance breaches and in some severe cases, loss of life) in the past three years, marking a slight upward trend in major outages.

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These days, I wince anytime a major digital service outage makes headlines. Outages happen, of course -- and sometimes they are unavoidable. Servers crash. Cybercriminals get lucky. People make mistakes.

That’s not why I wince, though. I wince because anytime an email exchange goes down, a music service crashes, or a mobile provider loses service, I know there are good odds that the culprit is none of those things. All too often, major service outages come down to two simple words: "expired certificate."

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In October, the internet was shaken by the Facebook outage that affected dozens of big-name companies, as well as millions of brands and businesses that advertise on Facebook’s platform. Because of something as simple as a misconfigured Domain Name System (DNS) record, every device with the Facebook app integration started DDoS-ing recursive DNS resolvers -- DDoS meaning "Distributed Denial of Service." This, in turn, caused overloading in countless cases across the board.

You might be thinking to yourself, "So, what? A few sites were offline for a couple of hours." But the outage brought to light other issues. Communications for the very Facebook employees that could fix this issue were crippled. Some of these hindrances went so far that people were unable to enter buildings because the physical badge system wasn't even online.

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