Even though most of us have spent this month working from home or furloughed due to COVID-19, glitches certainly haven’t been taking a break. We’re still relying on intricate software systems to keep the world moving, and we have little ability to maintain them in person. What’s more, changing usage patterns have stressed global networks in ways that are hard to anticipate. As a result, we find ourselves in a perfect storm for technical outages. Here are a few of those from this past month:
Bugs Block Stimulus Checks from Reaching Americans
April 16, 2020 | United States
With a record number of Americans out of work due to coronavirus, the US government attempted to stem the bleeding by sending a $1200 check to most people. One problem – due to numerous glitches affecting those who filed their taxes with third parties, millions of families have not yet gotten their much-needed aid. Even the “Get My Payment” tool that the IRS used to help expedite assistance often frustrated users with the message “Payment Status Not Available.”
Banking Outages Coincide with US Stimulus Checks
April 15, 2020 | Virginia, United States
Banking systems pride themselves on being accessible to all of the people, all of the time, but COVID-19 made those promises hard to fulfill. Essentially, so many people checked their various bank accounts at the same time that it caused banking systems to fail. Eventually, even the phone lines that banks set up to field account inquiries were swamped.
Prolonged Outages Hit FIFA 20, Apex Legends, and Other EA Properties
April 15, 2020 | Global
Since you can’t go outside, and you can’t go to work, video game servers are groaning under the weight of players with nothing else to do. EA, unfortunately, appears to have suffered in multiple dimensions. First, servers for FIFA 20 and Apex Legends went down due to what appeared to be an influx of players. Although this outage was initially resolved, servers went down again due to what appears to be a massive DDoS attack. Overall, outages persisted in their various forms for at least 24 hours.
Xbox Live Outage… You Know the Drill
April 9, 2020 | Global
In last month’s glitch tracker, we reported on an Xbox Live outage that made it difficult for players to form groups or voice chat with one another. As of April 9th, it appears that the same problems were still going on. Although the service hasn’t suffered continuous downtime, Down Detector began reporting server problems for Xbox Live on March 31st, and the problems were the same – inability to join matchmaking or chat with one another.
Separately, services for games such as Rainbow Six Siege and Grand Theft Auto also suffered brief outages.
Telecom Outages Make Hospitals Unreachable
March 30, 2020 |Netherlands
As the Netherlands started to become a hotspot for COVID-19 at the end of March, the worst happened – the hospitals dropped off the telecom network. T-Mobile, along with local networks KPN and VodafoneZiggo, reported connection problems that affected local hospitals, with landlines being particularly affected. No reason for the outage was given before the problem resolved.
T-Mobile Outages Crisscross the U.S.
April 8, 2020 | United States
A recent T-Mobile outage that spread across major U.S. population centers. Apart from a “looking into the issue” message, no one from T-Mobile ever outright told us why their service went down.
Zoom Glitch Breaks Critical Lockdown Communications
March 25, 2020 | Global
In these days of coronavirus, it seems as though Zoom is the only thing holding us together. So, what happens when Zoom breaks? Answer – lots and lots of angry tweets. A widespread technical outage on March 25th affected users around the world, particularly on the East Coast and West Coast of the US. Users were unable to send email invites or receive confirmation emails when signing up for the service, making it impossible to onboard new users.
April was truly a stressful month. Widespread outages were almost certainly related to COVID-19 in many respects, leaving people unable to communicate with loved ones, speak to doctors or even just relax during a time of unprecedented stress. Anodot can help companies that are struggling to find incidents amid shifting patterns. See how — request your demo here.
Written by Anodot
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