🧨 1. CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor Update Causes Global IT Outage (July 19, 2024)

A faulty update from CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor security software led to approximately 8.5 million Windows systems crashing worldwide. This unprecedented event disrupted critical services across various sectors, including airlines, hospitals, banks, and emergency services. The financial impact was estimated at over $10 billion. ​

✈️ 2. Delta Air Lines Faces Massive Disruption (July 19–25, 2024)

Delta Air Lines was severely affected by the CrowdStrike incident, cancelling over 7,000 flights and impacting more than 1.3 million passengers. The airline’s prolonged recovery led to federal investigations and significant financial losses. ​

🌍 3. Microsoft 365 and Azure Outage (September 12, 2024)

A global outage affected Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and Xbox Live, impacting over 25,000 users. The disruption was attributed to a change in the environment managed by a third-party Internet Service Provider. ​

🌐 4. Africa’s Submarine Cable Failure (March 13, 2024)

Damage to multiple undersea fibre optic cables, including WACS and MainOne, caused widespread internet outages across West and Central Africa. Countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Ivory Coast experienced significant connectivity issues, with some areas facing disruptions for weeks.

🧠 5. OpenAI Platform Outage (December 11, 2024)

A deployment of a new telemetry service overwhelmed OpenAI’s Kubernetes control plane, leading to a cascading failure across its services. Users faced login issues, partial page loads, and API call failures for over four hours. ​

📧 6. Microsoft Outlook Online Disruption (November 25, 2024)

Users experienced intermittent issues with Outlook Online, including timeout errors and HTTP 503 status codes. The problem stemmed from a change that caused an influx of retry requests, affecting service availability for over 24 hours.

These outages weren’t just inconvenient—they were disruptive on a global scale, exposing how deeply we rely on complex, interconnected systems. From cybersecurity missteps to infrastructure failures, each incident revealed a common theme: a lack of redundancy, resilience, or preparedness. That’s where high availability (HA) becomes critical. HA solutions ensure that essential systems remain operational, even when unexpected failures occur. By investing in technologies that prioritise uptime, redundancy, and failover mechanisms, businesses can safeguard themselves against becoming the next cautionary tale. In a world where minutes of downtime can mean millions lost, high availability isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.