Here are documented cases of application failures due to network problems caused by misconfigurations, along with references for each of cases for further information:
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Facebook, along with its services Instagram and WhatsApp, experienced a global outage lasting nearly six hours. The issue was caused by a misconfiguration during routine maintenance that led to the withdrawal of Facebook's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes. This misconfiguration effectively disconnected Facebook's data centers from the internet.
References:
Facebook Engineering Blog:
Our engineering team's view of the October 4th outage
BBC News Article:
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp go down
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Fastly, a major content delivery network (CDN) provider, experienced a global outage that took down numerous high-traffic websites, including Amazon, Reddit, and The New York Times. The outage was triggered by a software bug that was activated by a valid customer configuration change, highlighting how a misconfiguration can have widespread effects.
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Cloudflare suffered a significant outage due to a misconfigured firewall rule that was deployed during a software update. The misconfiguration caused CPU exhaustion on their servers, leading to widespread service disruptions for websites and applications using Cloudflare's services.
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Google Cloud Platform experienced a major network outage due to a misconfiguration in their network management system. This led to significant latency and connectivity issues, affecting applications and services relying on GCP, such as Spotify, Discord, and Snap.
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A network misconfiguration at Verizon led to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route leak, causing internet outages and service disruptions across multiple platforms, including Cloudflare and Amazon. The misconfiguration involved incorrect routing announcements that propagated across the internet.
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A misconfiguration in Microsoft's Azure DNS service led to a global outage, affecting multiple Microsoft services such as Teams, Xbox Live, and Office 365. The issue was caused by an error in the DNS update automation process, which resulted in DNS queries failing.
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Amazon Web Services experienced a significant outage in its S3 storage service in the US-EAST-1 region. The outage was caused by a misconfiguration during a debugging session; an incorrect command was executed that inadvertently removed a larger set of servers than intended, disrupting various internet services.
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GitLab.com suffered a major outage when a misconfigured backup procedure led to the accidental deletion of the primary database. Although not a network misconfiguration, it underscores the impact that configuration errors can have on application availability.
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A misconfiguration in IoT devices led to them being compromised and used in a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Dyn, a major DNS service provider. The attack caused widespread outages for major websites like Twitter, Reddit, and Netflix.
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These incidents highlight the critical importance of proper network configuration and the far-reaching consequences that misconfigurations can have on application availability and internet infrastructure. For a deeper dive into the technical aspects and prevention strategies, you might also consider reviewing scientific papers and industry reports on network reliability and configuration management.
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