Oct 20 (Reuters) - Amazon's (AMZN.O) , opens new tab cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday that affected major websites and apps globally, the first major internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction.

Here are some of the biggest tech outages in recent years, in chronological order:

Sign up here.

BRITISH AIRWAYS

IAG-owned (ICAG.L) , opens new tab British Airways was hit by a major computer system failure in May 2017 that stranded 75,000 passengers over a holiday weekend, sparking a public relations disaster and pledges from the carrier that it would do better in future. According to media reports, the blackout was caused by a maintenance contractor who accidentally switched off power.

ALPHABET (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab

Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India.

FASTLY (FSLY.N) , opens new tab

In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.

AKAMAI (AKAM.O) , opens new tab

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.

META (META.O) , opens new tab

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. The company said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

X Corp

Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online. Downdetector tracked more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

CROWDSTRIKE (CRWD.O) , opens new tab

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.

Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and canceled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.

AWS

Amazon's cloud services unit was hit by an outage on October 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Fortnite and Snapchat (SNAP.N) , opens new tab.

AWS said in a 0711 GMT update on its website that it was seeing increased "error rates and latencies" for multiple services. In a later update, it said the underlying issue was fully mitigated and most of its operations were working normally.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/major-tech-outages-recent-years-2024-07-19/