The world has been buffering over the past month due to its reliance on a faulty internet. Several major internet outages have caused rapids in a previously smooth sail for networking and media giants such as Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, and Apple.
According to a report by TechCrunch, the internet failures first began on June 2 when most service on the U.S. east coast was knocked out for over three hours by a huge Google Cloud outage. The outage occurred due to a bug, which caused a faulty configuration change to surge through Google’s servers.
A few weeks later on June 24, an outage that lasted a few hours caused Cloudflare to lose 15% of its global traffic, and resulted in companies like Amazon and Linode losing service. Cloudflare was quick to blame the issue on Verizon for flaws in their internet trafficking systems.
Cloudflare was hit again on July 2, only this time the outage was caused by an internal issue and it only lasted a short time.
Google was also hit on July 2 by an outage, and while the issue took about six hours to solve, traffic continued throughout the day through alternative routes.
The dark cloud over the internet stayed put on July 3, as Facebook and its accompanying services, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for about eight hours. According to TechCrunch, the issue can be attributed to downtime, as can Twitter’s outage regarding its direct messaging service, also on July 3.
Most recently, Apple saw its iCloud get battered by an outage that affected the entire U.S. The outage was caused by a similar issue to Cloudflare’s problem with Verizon: another border gateway protocol issue.
TechCrunch’s Zach Whittaker gave a nod to Cloudflare and Google for explaining their issues and disapproved of Apple, Facebook, and Twitter’s lack of acknowledgement.
It’s not believed any single event tied the outages together, rather, the internet failures are a result of massively bad luck. However, many people have jumped to a fearful assumption that hackers are running rampant on the monopolies of the tech world. Even though, according to TechCrunch, these rumors are false, the hypothetical hackers have most likely gotten their desired response. TechCrunch reported that the outages have wounded confidence in massive companies like Amazon and Google.