Find out what the biggest internet blackouts of all time were

An issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a global cyber blackout which affected airlines, communication systems, banks and hospitals in several countries.

These blackouts of online systems usually happen when a service or platform used by many different companies suffers 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 in Microsoft Windows operating systems — which caused the system to be interrupted. companies around the world that use antivirus.

These blackouts remind us that even the big companies that seem so solid are subject to the failures of technology. And it’s not the first time they’ve happened.

What were the biggest internet blackouts in history?

Target, in October 2021

On October 4, 2021, Meta’s services — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Menssenger — crashed after major instability on the company’s platform.

The applications were down for six hours after an error that, according to the targetoccurred 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 the systems, and had problems accessing the building and the hardware needed for the correction.

The Meta blackout was so long that conspiracy theories began to circulate on social media, giving rise to several memes.

Fastly, in June 2021

Fastly is a cloud-based content delivery network (CDN) provider. And although its name is not as well known, the companies that use its services are.

The failure caused an interruption of around an hour on sites such as Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, several newspapers and news portals, and even the official UK government website.

According to the companythe failure was 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, in May 2017

In 2017, a crash in British Airways systems caused flight delays worldwide, with more than 75,000 people affected. All flights from Heathrow and Gatwick airports in London had to be canceled on May 27, the company’s website and call centers also stopped working.

The failure was caused after a power outage, which was accidentally turned off by one of the company’s employees, according to Reuters.

Google, in December 2020

The outage in Google’s systems may have lasted 45 minutes, but its impact was felt around the world. All of the company’s services were affected, such as Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Maps, among others.

According to the companya problem with storage space occurred in Google authentication tools because the system failed to automatically free up more space when needed.

Dyn, in 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 biggest in history.

Understand the global cyber failure that affected flights, banks and hospitals

See photos of the cyber blackout around the world