June was the month where many of us stretched our legs, glad to be out of quarantine — and then immediately went back inside due to fears of a second wave. “One step forward, one step back,” offers an adequate summary of life in a pandemic. It’s also a sentiment that applies to the ongoing challenge in mitigating glitches and outages. As you’ll see during this month’s glitch tracker, every effort to stem the tide of downed applications seems to be met by yet another setback.
“Front Page of the Internet” Experiences Outages
June 25, 2020 | Global
If your site has 430 million users — many of whom are noticeably angry — then even a small amount of downtime has an outsized effect. When Reddit went down for just an hour on June 25, it generated an absolute tidal wave of reports and complaints. It didn’t help that the company claimed that the issue had been resolved–but users were still reporting issues hours later.
Virgin Media Hit by Glitch Trifecta
June 25, 2020 | UK
You may as well rename England as “Downtime Island.” Virgin Media, one of the UK’s major ISPs, went down on June 25 for the third time in just a few weeks, affecting the millions of UK customers now working from home.
Unplanned Downtime Affects the Return of British Football
June 17, 2020 | UK
See what we mean? Twenty minutes before the UK’s Premiere League was scheduled to return from a plague-induced hiatus, the game’s carrier, Now TV, found itself unable to offer sports passes allowing fans to watch. Stymied viewers complained that with just over three months to prepare for a surge in viewership, the network was still unable to make adequate preparations.
T-Mobile Outage Prompts Regulatory Ire
June 15, 2020 | US
It was an outage so large that many commentators mistook it for a DDoS attack. A failure in a single leased fiber circuit caused a cascade of glitches that left T-Mobile, one of the “Big Four” carriers in the United States, unable to connect users’ calls or send text messages for nearly 13 hours on end. The network failure was widespread enough that the FCC has begun an investigation into whether it affected public safety, including an emergency response line, and government operations.
Iceland Bankrupted by Erroneous Transactions
June 12, 2020 | UK
Iceland (the UK supermarket chain, not the country) has announced that it will be overhauling its entire online payments system after a glitch overdrew its customer’s accounts. The glitch, known as ring-fencing, involves customers being charged multiple times for the same item. Although the supermarket chain is fixing its payment system to rectify the error, it has announced that it will not be refunding the overdraft fees the purchases racked up on customer’s accounts.
An Economic Rebound is a Bad Time for a Coinbase Outage
June 3, 2020 | Global
Bitcoin is supposed to be a stable alternative to the global currency system, but its volatility has recently reached a six-year high. The currency experienced a brief swing over the $10,000 mark, which prompted users to try and sell their gains — but Coinbase, one of the largest Bitcoin trading platforms, chose that exact moment to experience a glitch. Better luck next time, crypto-traders.
eBay Outage Thwarts Auction Buyers
June 3, 2020 | Global
Users in the US, UK and Australia reported a widespread, long-lasting outage at eBay, the widely-used auction site. Although the outage was certainly long, lasting at least two hours (normally a murderous amount of time for an ecommerce site), eBay appears to have dodged a bullet. The site was down from 2 to 4 in the morning Eastern Time, when most of its U.S. users would have been asleep.
Swisscom Outages Prompt Investigations
May 31, 2020 | Switzerland
Last month, we reported on a series of outages at Swisscom, the Swiss internet service provider. These outages were apparently bad enough that both the company and the Swiss government have formed investigatory teams to understand how the problem escalated.
This June, it felt like the equilibrium of daily life changed under our feet again, right when we thought things were slowly getting back to normal. For networks and tech companies, however, there is no normal, just a never-ending series of fires to extinguish. If you’d like to eliminate problems with your network before you have to endure a government probe, see if it’s time to adopt anomaly detection. Contact us if you’d like to have an Anodot specialist assess your needs.
Written by Anodot
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