Looking Back at the Most Disruptive Internet Outages of 2020

They say that hindsight is 20/20, and the calendar year 2020 is certainly best observed from the rearview mirror. In the midst of a global pandemic, widespread shelter-in-place orders, and economic shutdowns, the Internet has become our most critical lifeline to staying connected and getting business done. Yet, the Internet is fraught with performance glitches and hidden dependencies that can take down critical services and applications at any time. While Internet outages can (and do) happen to even the most sophisticated enterprise, there is always a silver lining—a learning to be had.

In this blog, I'm going to cover the most disruptive outages of 2020 (dealer’s choice) and discuss what enterprise IT teams can learn from them as we enter the new year.

The year had been off to a relatively quiet start, with very few large-scale Internet outages to speak of—despite worries that the Internet might buckle under the unprecedented strain resulting from the pandemic. However, all good things must come to an end, and the Internet’s “good streak” came to an abrupt halt on April 1, as the Russian telecommunication behemoth, Rostelecom perpetrated a large-scale BGP hijack involving more than 8,000 prefixes, including those belonging to Google, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudflare and Amazon.

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