Cloud and Internet Backbone
The shared layers most of the internet quietly runs on, and what happens when a region, a CDN, or an identity service has a bad morning.
3 articles in this arc
The Largest IT Outage in History Was a File Full of Zeros
On July 19, 2024, a single content update from a security vendor crashed 8.5 million Windows machines in 78 minutes. Flights canceled, hospitals and broadcasters disrupted, and a fix that had to be applied by hand. This is the complete technical account of the CrowdStrike outage.
The Company That Deleted Itself From the Internet's Map
On October 4, 2021, a maintenance command withdrew Facebook's routes from the internet, and the internal tools, the communications and the site access needed to fix it all ran on the infrastructure that had just disappeared. Six hours, nearly three billion users, and a recovery that had to be carried out on foot.
The Typo That Broke a Quarter of the Web
On February 28, 2017, an engineer running a routine playbook mistyped one command. It removed more servers than intended, and a large slice of the internet that quietly runs on Amazon S3 went dark for four hours.
