To keep you up-to-date with what’s going on in anomaly detection, we keep an ongoing list of the biggest glitches happening in the business world. Here is what made waves in June.
Emergency Lines Downed By Telco Outage
June 25, 2019
When Dutch telco KPN suffered a major outage on the evening of Tuesday, June 25, the 112 emergency number was also knocked out across the country. “We have no reason to think it was (a hack) and we monitor our systems 24/7,” the company spokesperson told Reuters. Emergency services responded by putting out alternative contact information on social media. The four-hour outage was the largest in recent Dutch history, affecting landlines and mobile phones, and the cause is still unclear.
Major Sites Down In Massive Verizon Outage
June 24, 2019
Just as the workweek was getting started on the East Coast of the United States, major websites came grinding to a halt. Google, Amazon, Reddit, Spectrum and many other websites went down because of a Verizon outage which lasted for roughly a couple hours before service was restored. Cloudflare, which provides performance and security to websites, had their serviced impacted during the incident. They later explained what happened in this blog post, where they pushed for better industry standards and routing security.
Target Outage
June 15, 2019
Two days in a row, Target checkouts across the U.S. were hit by an outage that meant stores could only accept cash and gift card payments. According to the company, it was a not a data breach or security-related issue, but instead an “internal technology issue”.
The first outage (Saturday) was related to Target’s cash registers service, directly related to Target’s own code. The second outage (Sunday) was due to NCR, a vendor they use to accept payments. When NCR experienced an issue at one of their data centers it also took Target down.
Twitch Connection Issues
June 15, 2019
The popular streaming service Twitch went down for streamers in mid-June. The issue with the servers occurred during a melee competition broadcast for Overwatch League, Call of Duty and Super Smash Bros.
TalkTalk Down
June 14, 2019
Hundreds of British customers were unable to access their email when TalkTalk went down. The broadband service outage affected customers in London, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol and Southampton.
PlayStation Network Down
June 13, 2019
Across the world, the PlayStation Network went down for many users. Customers were unable to use multiplayer functions, access the network, or use any other functions of the PSN. All core PlayStation consoles were affected by error “WS-37403-7″.
Spotify Outage
June 13, 2019
After Spotify announced the roll-out of their redesigned app for Premium users, the service went down. According to the company, the outage was not related to the new app redesign, but they did not provide any information on what caused the problem. During the outage, users had difficulty accessing the app for hours in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and the U.K.
eBay Outage
June 12, 2019
eBay crashed in mid-June with the entire site unable to load or search. For one hour, there were more than 7,000 outage reports in both Europe and Australia where the server was having issues.
WordPress VIP Go Sites Down
June 11, 2019
The WordPress VIP Go platform was hit by a major issue that resulted in many major sites going down for a few hours. The problem occurred on the VIP Go hosting platform.
Google Cloud Disruption
June 8, 2019
A prolonged outage caused Google’s Cloud to break, affecting everything from YouTube to Shopify, Snapchat and Gmail. The issues continued for an entire afternoon and into the night due to a combination of two misconfigurations and a software bug. A simple maintenance job — routine configuration of a few servers in one geographic region — turned into a nightmare of Internet-wide gridlock.
“Debugging the problem was significantly hampered by failure of tools competing over use of the now-congested network,” the company wrote. “Furthermore, the scope and scale of the outage, and collateral damage to tooling as a result of network congestion, made it initially difficult to precisely identify impact and communicate accurately with customers.”
ATO System Outage
June 4, 2019
ATO’s online systems experienced a major outage . Services for tax professionals, agents, and PLS services all went down. Thousands of customers were affected, which was particularly trying considering it was a day before tax returns were required to be logged in Australia. Services were up again by the next morning.
Monzo Glitch
June 2, 2019
An app-glitch left Monzo customers unable to send or receive payments last week. Some transfers were delayed or even failed completely, including salary transfers. Hailed the “bank of the future,” Monzo’s glitch affected some 1.8 million customers.
Destiny 2 Down
June 2, 2019
Hundreds of players and fans had to deal with a server issue that meant they couldn’t play Destiny 2. Instead, they got Centipede, Coconut and Currant error messages. Bungie reported they were working on the issue during the seven-hour issue.
Google Cloud Outage
June 2, 2019
For more than five hours, Google’s Cloud was down. Many services including Shopify, Snap, Discord and other popular apps were offline and unavailable. According to reports, it was a network congestion issue in the eastern U.S. The root cause of the disruption was a configuration change that was intended for a small number of servers in a single region.
ITV and Channel 4 Crash
May 31, 2019
During the semi-final of “Britain’s Got Talent”, Virgin Media’s ITV went down with a message saying, “channel is currently unavailable.” Channel 4 also went down for some time. During the incident, Virgin Media’s response was “Please don’t contact with regards to ITV and Channel 4 being down as it is a known fault that has already been logged. We are currently working on a fix…”
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Written by Anodot
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