It has certainly been quite a month. With millions of workers forced to stay home due to COVID-19, or in some cases laid off altogether, the world’s networks have been under some unusual strains. Let’s see how that’s played out during this month in glitches.
Telstra Mobile Network Downshifts Users to 3G
March 23, 2020 | Melbourne, Australia
Telstra users across Australia faced consternation due to massive network congestion. As Telstra and many other service providers close their call centers due to the coronavirus, they find themselves with a diminished ability to provide support, even as regular patterns of network traffic change due to everyone working from home.
Discord Outage Pushes Gamers Offline
March 23, 2020 | Europe
Discord is a venue where millions of gamers communicate every day as they play online. Again, with everyone working from home or furloughed from work, more people are gaming. This increased stress caused an outage affecting Western Europe, with disgruntled gamers expressing outrage via Twitter.
Unemployment Blitz Drives Application System Glitch
March 20, 2020 | West Virginia, US
As mass layoffs hit the US, a record number of people are filing for unemployment. In West Virginia, so many people applied for unemployment in a single day that their combined efforts shut down the application site. Authorities now recommend that users apply during off-hours in order to avoid crashes and slowdowns.
Xbox Live Collapses Under the Weight of Social Distancing
March 20, 2020 | Global
With millions of people practicing social distancing, many people have no recourse other than to stay inside and play videogames for entertainment. Xbox Live is yet another service to experience downtime due to this increased workload, with players unable to connect for groups or chat with one another.
UK Mobile Networks Falter Under Usage Surge
March 17, 2020 | UK
Three UK MNOs, including BT, O2, and Three UK all suffered glitches, leaving users unable to make calls. Although none of these mobile networks identified the cause of the glitch, it came among a cluster of other failures due to the spread of COVID-19.
Fortnite Server Outages Tied to Coronavirus
March 17, 2020 |Global
As phones went out in the UK, players of Fortnite – the world’s most popular game – found themselves unable to log in or purchase items. Since the game is favored by schoolchildren, and since most children are currently home from school, many games and other online services find themselves experiencing unusual peak loads.
Sky Broadband Suffers Cable Break
March 5, 2020 | UK
It’s almost a relief to see something non-COVID-related, isn’t it? On March 5, UK ISP Sky Broadband admitted that a breakage in a fiber cable caused services to fail for customers across the country, with outage reports numbering up to five hundred per minute.
As Stocks Suffer, a Popular Trading App Fails
March 2, 2020 | Global
Robinhood, a day-trading app popular with younger investors, experienced an outage at the worst possible time. As day-traders attempted to rescue their portfolios during one of the worst stock market slumps ever recorded, they found themselves unable to make trades. Many frustrated users took to Twitter to complain that they were literally losing money by the minute.
Smart Feeder Glitch Results in Hungry Pets
February 24, 2020 | Global
Pet owners everywhere are angry due to a week-long system outage experienced by Petnet, a so-called “smart feeder” device. During the outage, the expensive device either stopped dispensing food or dispensed it at the wrong hour, turning carefully-developed feeding schedules into a roll of the dice. Customers were angry not just due to the outage, but due to the fact that tech support went offline at the same time as well, with emails to tech support being marked as undeliverable.
If you thought February was stressful, then March was a true wake-up call. Companies around the world experienced a massive stress test that they could never have expected – and many failed when their users changed their usage patterns far beyond the expected norm. If you want your systems to expect the unexpected, it might be time to consider an anomaly detection solution from Anodot. Contact us today for more information.
Written by Anodot
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