CrowdStrike's global outage wreaked havoc. Here are 6 other major tech outages from recent years

Meta’s uber-popular social media sites Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp all switched off for a whopping six hours on Oct. 4, 2021. A routine maintenance job gone awry effectively disconnected all Facebook data centers globally, affecting more than 10 million users worldwide.

On June 8, 2021, cloud computing services provider Fastly experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug. The company said it detected the problem within a minute, and within 49 minutes, 95% of its network was operating as normal. The outage took down a sizable slice of the internet, including Amazon, Target, CNN, the Gov.uk website, Reddit, The New York Times, CNN, PayPal, and Spotify.

Google has suffered a handful of outages in recent years, which have caused its apps and services to crash. Arguably its biggest outage took place on Dec. 14, 2020, a time when many people were still working and studying remotely at the heigh of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that incident, Google services including Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube all went dark for about an hour.

A number of major websites and services were offline for about 25 minutes on July 17, 2020, after a Cloudflare DNS router announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to go offline. Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify, and League of Legends were all affected by the outage, TechCrunch reported at the time.

With more than 2.9 million outage reports, according to DownDetector, Spotify suffered the largest outage of 2022. On March 8 of that year, the most popular streaming platform in the world left users without their favorite tracks and podcasts for almost two hours.

An “uncontrolled return of power” following an outage damaged servers in British Airways’ data centre, causing a massive IT shutdown that left 75,000 passengers stranded on May 27, 2017.