Downtime - Famous Outages

Famous Outages

On Mother's Day, Sunday, May 8, 1988, a fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company. One of the largest switching systems in the state, the facility processed more than 3.5 million calls each day while serving 38,000 customers, including numerous businesses, hospitals, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway Airports.

Virtually the entire AT&T network of 4ESS toll tandems switches went in and out of service over and over again on Jan. 15, 1990 disrupting long distance service for the entire nation. The problem dissipated by itself when traffic slowed down. A software bug was found.

AT&T lost its frame relay network for 26 hours on April 13, 1998. This affected many thousands of customers, and bank transactions were one casualty. AT&T failed to meet the service level agreement on their contracts with customers and had to refund 6600 customer accounts, costing millions of dollars.

Xbox Live had intermittent downtime during the 2007-2008 holiday season which lasted thirteen days. Increased demand from Xbox 360 purchasers (the largest number of new user sign-ups in the history of Xbox Live) was given as the reason for the downtime; in order to make amends for the service issues, Microsoft offered their users the opportunity to receive a free game.

Sony's PlayStation Network April 2011 outage, began on April 20, 2011, and was gradually restored on May 14, 2011 starting in the United States. This outage is the longest amount of time the PSN has been offline since its inception in 2006. Sony has stated the problem was caused by an external intrusion which resulted in the confiscation of personal information. Sony reported on April 26, 2011 that a large amount of user data had been obtained by the same hack that resulted in the downtime.

Telstra's Ryde switch failed in late 2011 after water egress into the electrical switch board from continuing wet weather. The Ryde switch is one of the largest by area switches in Australia, and affected more than 720,000 services.