Since Mark Zuckerberg brought WhatsApp and Instagram into his social media empire, users have increasingly had to deal with not one but three of their favourite platforms suffering from outages whenever Facebook experiences a technical issue. In the first week of July , users across the globe found themselves unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp.
On December 6th , more than 30 million O2 users in the UK lost access to data services after a software issue left them unable to use 3G and 4G services. Customers of O2 and the other companies using its network including Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, Lycamobile, O2 subsidiary Giffgaff were affected after a software glitch in equipment supplied by Ericsson brought the network to its knees.
The nationwide outage also affected Transport for London's live electronic timetables at bus stops. Millions of TSB customers were locked out of their accounts after an IT upgrade led to an online banking outage. A planned system upgrade was expected to shut internet and mobile banking services down for one weekend in April , but ended up causing months of disruption. Immediately after the new system was switched on, many customers experienced problems logging in, while others were shown details from other people's accounts or inaccurate credits and debits on their own.
Customers remained locked out of their accounts two weeks after the initial outage. In July, TSB was still working its way through the backlog of complaints, when another outage struck, locking customers out of their online accounts once again. TSB claimed that the problem was resolved later that day, but the debacle will further rupture the bank's relationship with parent company Sabadell.
In , doctors and hospital staff of the Wales NHS experienced a widespread computer failure that led to them being unable to access patient files. According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the failure was due to technical issues as opposed to a cyber attack yet it still caused wide disruption as GPs were unable to access blood and X-Ray results. It also caused a backlog as patients could not be contacted to cancel appointments, and notes could not be typed up and saved on NHS systems.
At the start of , Google researchers revealed CPU hardware vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre had affected almost all computers on the market. Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers that discovered the flaw at Graz University of Technology described Meltdown as "one of the worst CPU bugs ever found".
Although these are both primarily hardware vulnerabilities, they communicate with the operating system to access locations in its memory space. Read next: Meltdown and Spectre chip flaw timeline. Meltdown, Google explains , "breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. This allows a program to access the memory, and also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. Spectre meanwhile "breaks the isolation between different applications" — "it allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets.
The attack was due to vulnerabilities found in Microsoft operating systems installed in millions of computers around the world. See also: WannaCry ransomware timeline. According to Microsoft, the Windows versions that were vulnerable to the attack were versions which were no longer supported by Microsoft such as Windows 8 and Windows XP, which the NHS trusts and affected companies seemed to be running.
In February , Cloudflare faced a major software bug that led to sensitive customer data like passwords, cookies and authentication tokens to get leaked from customer websites. Cloudflare is known to provide performance and security services to millions of customer websites and although the bug was patched within hours, it is expected that the data leakage could have started as early as September Bitcoin Unlimited suffered a serious memory leak which caused several nodes to fall from to about This is almost 70 percent of the nodes run by Bitcoin Unlimited at the time.
Although the memory leak was patched fairly quickly, this appeared to be the third memory leakage to crash the preferred method for Bitcoin Unlimited. For the sixth time in a year, British Airways faced a massive global IT failure which led to the airline cancelling all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick in May The IT failure affected over 1, flights, British Airways call centres, the website and mobile app.
Nest said the fault had been caused by a December 4. It has since rolled out a 4. Millions of the bank's customers were unable to access online accounts. Services only returned to normal after a two-day outage. In December a glitch caused more than 3, US prisoners to be released early. According to reports, the problem has been ongoing for 13 years until a new IT boss was appointed and informed the governor's office.
It is estimated that on average prisoners were released 49 days early. HSBC again! In August a reported , individual payments failed to be processed by HSBC, which left many potentially without pay before the Bank Holiday weekend.
The cause of this major failure was a problem with its electronic payment system for its business banking users which affected salary payments. Bacs is the payment system that is used for payment processes across the UK is reported to have picked up on the issue but noted that it was an 'isolated issue'.
According to reports this error has been inflating spouses' finances since April but was only brought to like in December According to the Office of National Statistics there were , divorces in England and Wales in so the damage that this fault has caused is yet to be fully revealed. In April this , Bloomberg's London office suffered a software glitch resulting in their trading terminals going down for two hours.
In a statement Bloomberg said: "Service has been fully restored. We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic.
In June about , payments failed to enter the accounts of RBS overnight — including wages and benefit payments. Many took several days to come through. In 6. A glitch that occurred in December led to over 3, US prisoners being released before their declared date. The software was designed to monitor the behaviour of prisoners and was introduced in The problem was occurring for about 13 years and on an average prisoners were released almost 49 days in advance.
In August , HSBC failed to process about , individual payments that left many people without pay before a long Bank Holiday weekend. Later in a statement Bloomberg declared that the services were restored and the glitch was a result of both hardware and software failures in the network, resulting in excessive network traffic.
About 6 lakh payments failed to get through the accounts of RBS overnight in June , which included wages and benefits. In , about 6. In May , Airbus issued an alert for urgently checking its AM aircraft when a report detected a software bug that had caused a fatal crash earlier in Spain. Prior to this alert, a test flight in Seville has caused the death of four air force crew members and two were left injured. Source: Theguardian. The system is an online service for farmers to apply for Common Agricultural Policy payments from the EU.
This online service that was supposed to be up and running by May got delayed due to integration issues between the portal and the rules engine software. It was then not expected to be up even by In July , Co-operative Food apologized to its customers and promised a refund within 24 hours. Source: Computerworlduk. Mispricing is a common headache faced by retailers due to system glitches, resulting in retail outlets offering customers excessively lucrative offers.
John Lewis is a recent example, where the online retailer witnessed a price glitch on its website that erroneously advertised hardware at software rates. After the glitch got identified, Tesco cancelled the sale and did not respond to these orders, resulting in dissatisfaction with the customers.
Source: Mycustomer. Eventually, the company decided to sell the Plasma TV sets at a lowered price after it faced a customer petition. Source: Thisismoney. The core reason was that the software glitches were identified right when the deal took place, where problems related to issuance of checks, errors on circuit court dockets and creation of hidden charges came up in the weeks after it went Live. The software bugs detected helped basic programmers to enjoy unlimited free rides — at the expense of Ola and at the expense of users.
The issue went public when customers brought up the weaknesses in the system. It serves , people in the city and provides expert care for 5. Source: Digitalhealth. In September , Cisco Systems released a critical security bulletin to announce an IT exposure that could allow remote unauthenticated users to get access to its email security appliances.
The company further indicated that there is a way out of this that can stop this remote access to the email appliances. Source: Threatpost. Cisco again! The vulnerabilities declared allowed remote access to systems that could enable a hacker to execute code on targeted devices.
In September , the US government in a dramatic move ordered Volkswagen to recall about , cars after learning that the company had deployed advanced software to cheat emission tests and allowed its cars to produce 40 times more emissions than the decided limit.
The company further admitted it and announced a recall as well. In October , Interlogix, a wireless personal panic devices manufacturer recalled about 67, devices due to its inability to operate during emergency situations. The probable cause for this glitch in operations was that the device was unable to communicate with the security system during an event of emergency. The way out was the manufacturer replacing the devices. If these problems arise at early stages of the project, it is guaranteed, that these problems will fester throughout the project, and at some point, stop the evolution of the software.
The hard part is admitting failure and taking necessary corrective actions. Dependencies might kill software prematurely. Dependency can be other software, like user interface framework, or hardware. Problems arise, when dependency functionality changes, gets too expensive or goes out of maintenance. Do not commit to a single framework dependency , because the framework maintainer is never going to make the same commitment to your project.
At the start of the project, it might seem convenient to put the whole program into the same monolithic system.
Later, during the maintenance phase, it will be realized that implementing new features takes longer and weekly releases are no longer happening. Soon features roll-outs will stop, because the cost of evolving the system is too high. Separating different functionalities to independent microservices, helps to maintain the evolvability of the system. Microservices can be evolved independently, without changes to other services. In many cases monolithic approach is valid choice.
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