Recently the social media giant Facebook had become globally unavailable due to a configuration change to its routers, taking down Instagram and Whatsapp with it. Even though it lasted for just 7 hours, the glitch caused a major frenzy in the online community. Meanwhile let’s have a look at some other occurrences of internet shutdowns.
Crux of the Matter
2008 And 2011 Submarine Cable Disruptions
The first incident damaged 5 high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East. The second disruption even affected Indian users.
2011 Armenian Shutdown
A person digging for scrap metal damaged land cables and severed connectivity for 30 lakh Armenian citizens.
2016 Dyn Cyberattack
It involved many distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting systems operated by DNS provider Dyn. This caused disruption in major Internet platforms in Europe and North America.
2016 Germany Malware Attack
Due to failed exploitation attempts by Mirai malware, ~1 million routers from Deutsche Telekom crashed. This lead to connectivity losses for users of these devices for a day.
2019 Shutdown In India
Mass protests occurred in several states as the Indian Govt passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. Various state governments shut down Internet access, affecting millions of users for over a week.
2019 Verizon Outage
The popular Internet transit provider Verizon accidentally rerouted IP packages after it accepted a network misconfiguration from DQE, a small ISP. Thus, connections meant for FB, Cloudflare, etc. ended up going through DQE, causing a massive Internet strain.
2019 Iranian Shutdown
Making it the year of shutdowns, Iran Govt also shut down Internet for 7 days. This was an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-Govt protests.
2021 Massive Internet Outage
Countless famous websites like The Guardian and Reddit went down for an hour when content delivery network ‘Fastly’, reported a widespread failure. The outage also took down sites of the likes of Amazon and the UK Govt.
Curiopedia
The word Internet was used in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven.
Curated Coverage