When automatic software updates go horribly wrong
Posted in Main on May 3rd, 2010 by Pingdom
McAfee had a nasty surprise in store for their customers a couple of weeks ago. An automatic update to its antivirus software suddenly pointed out a system-critical file in Windows XP as malicious. The result was that the file was removed, and Windows XP stopped working.
This crippled entire companies, which often have large sets of computers running XP. To make matters worse: every single computer had to be manually restored. Considering many companies had thousands of Windows XP machines, you can imagine the time it took and the outrage it caused.
Accidents such as these are uncommon, but they still happen way too often for comfort. And if you think the latest incident with McAfee was a one-off? Think again.
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Every day brings a new set of outages on the Internet. Websites go down, online services run into trouble, networks have glitches, and so on. When a lot of users are affected, these outages make the news and set the blogosphere abuzz. We here at Pingdom work with downtime-related issues every day and probably spend more time reading about these things than most, so we decided to sum up the year so far for your convenience, and add some analysis of our own in the process.
) of the more notable Web- and Internet-related outages and incidents so far in 2008. We chose outages that have either affected a lot of people, or have other implications that we deemed important to highlight.
