This year is a leap year, and you know what that means? February has an extra 24 hours of glitches in store for us than usual. Let’s take a look at all the new glitches that February has brought us and learn how to avoid them.
UK Outage Sends Sports Fans Reeling
February 24, 2020 | UK
British sports fans are notorious for their outbursts during games, and although their football fans are well-known for being boisterous, their rugby fans come in a close second. That’s why it was particularly unfortunate that a Virgin Media outage blacked out a tense rugby game between England and Ireland. Fans blanketed the internet with hostile messages, and the company was forced to issue an official apology.
When O365 Goes Down, So Does Everything Else
February 22, 2020 | Global
Office, Windows and Xbox Live users were all affected by an Office 365 outage that sent multiple services crashing down. Since launching Office 365 as a cloud service, Microsoft has made it the lynchpin for multiple consumer and enterprise products, which means that if it goes down, it takes many other services with it.
Circle K Double-Charges Customers – And Doesn’t Pay Them Back?
February 20, 2020 | Ireland
Motorists refueling at Circle K received an unwelcome surprise when the gas station apparently charged them double the price they were supposed to pay for fuel. Circle K is now stonewalling the affected motorists and has failed to provide a date for when they might expect restitution.
New Zealand Banking Customers Hit with Double Charges
February 21, 2020 | NZ
Continuing what unfortunately appears to be a theme, banking customers at New Zealand’s Westpac bank were surprised and alarmed to see doubled transactions on their banking records. Fortunately for customers, although the records duplicated payment entries, no extra money was actually taken from their balances.
Twitter Glitch Silences Users
February 7, 2020 | Global
If you’re a dedicated Twitter user, being unable to post is a fate worse than death. Unfortunately, that’s what many Twitter users had to endure when a glitch prevented them from tweeting. Even though users couldn’t post, it’s possible to estimate the scale of the outage from the fact that DownDetector accumulated more than 11,000 reports during around half an hour of unplanned downtime.
Outlook Users Have Their Emails Marked as Spam
February 6, 2020 |Global
A major Microsoft Outlook glitch mistakenly marked users’ emails as spam. Many users also found themselves unable to log in, send or receive emails in their entirety. This may have been due to issues with the spam filter, but if there’s more to the story Microsoft isn’t telling.
Microsoft Teams Shuts Out Users
February 3, 2020 | Global
Microsoft Teams product, a workplace collaboration tool meant to rival Slack, experienced a four-hour outage due to an expiring certificate – even though the company literally makes a tool that monitors expiring certificates.
Australian ISP Goes Offline – with Unexpected Transparency
January 28, 2020 | Australia
ISPs have temporary outages all the time. The event affecting Australia’s TPG and iiNet internet providers was fairly ordinary, affecting DNS services and lasting approximately two hours. What’s interesting is that iiNet didn’t just tell customers to wait out the temporary issue. Instead, they gave users a solution, telling them to switch to a public DNS provider such as 1.0.0.1. In addition, the more technical minded of our readers may appreciate reading iiNet’s NOC logs, which the company released to demonstrate the handling of the incident. This is a great way to handle outages, and we think more service providers should do the same!
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February was a stressful month for some companies. If you’d rather not put yourself through the same hassle, it might be time to consider an anomaly detection solution from Anodot. Mitigate outages, see and stop bugs before they affect your users, and start the new decade off right!
Written by Anodot
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