Unless you are lucky enough not to be subscribed to Singtel, chances are you didn’t have any broadband last weekend. Over the course of 24 hours, Singtel users simply did not have access to the internet. Anyone who needed access to either work or study needed to use their mobile internet. Singtel did work hard to fix the issue and have offered discounts to their subscribers. However, the limited updates and lack of information have done severe damage to their corporate image. It’s also likely that we won’t find out what the cause of the problems was for a long time. With that being said, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Here are some major outages that have occurred recently that have caused significant issues.
2012 India Outage
Image courtesy: BBC
In 2012, a huge power outage occurred in India. Now, because of inadequate infrastructure, this is nothing new. What was unprecedented was the scale of the outage. Over the course of 24 hours 630million individuals, over half of the population of India, went without power. I was there when it happened, and it was crazy. While the wealthier states had their power back up and running within the day, outlying settlements in the poorer regions remained without power for several days afterwards. Unless you were lucky enough to have a generator, that meant time without refrigeration, access to the internet, everything. It is still the largest power outage in history. The source of the issue turned out to be overloading a key power line.
Source: BBC
Hackers attack German internet
Image courtesy: Deutsche Telekom
This outage has a very clear, sinister background. Last week, hackers attempted to hijack consumer routers in Germany, specifically Deutsche Telekom. In response, 900,000 routers went down over the weekend. That means a few million suffered the same fate as Singapore, with the added problem of having to take steps to reboot their routers without being affected by the Malware. The scariest part? German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s warning that we could expect more of these kinds of attacks in the future.
Source: CNET
Sony’s PSN woes
Image courtesy: Dualshockers
There are a lot of history-making events in this list. Sony had to deal with what turned out to be the largest security breach in history in 2011 when the PSN was compromised. All 77million users were denied access to the network. To add insult to injury, their personal information was compromised as well. The outage went on to last 23 days from April 17 to May 14, longer than Sony’s initial estimates, and it was not fixed until a firmware update was released. Again, a lack of information from Sony caused a massive consumer backlash at the company. Users did get some free games out of the outage, but losing your credit-card details is still a tough thing to swallow. Especially to such a massive corporation’s security oversight.
Source: BBC
Australia’s week-long headache
Image courtesy: Exetel
Unlike all the other outages on this list, this one is still going on. Customers of Australian ISP Exetel in New South Wales have experienced a week-long break from the internet. Many of those affected are business owners, and in today’s connected world, not having internet access could very well be a death sentence to a small business. Another common theme with the other listed outages is reported poor customer service, with long hold times on hotlines and no end in sight. Given that Australia already has notoriously bad internet access for a developed nation, this is especially bad. Let’s hope that this gets fixed shortly, or many Australians are going to have a dreadful start to the holiday season.
Source: Smart Company
