The fourth longest blackout in history. In Australia, 10 million people were cut off from the internet

• Outage of Japanese operator KDDI (Japan, about 48 hours)

2-3 July 2022 – a massive outage of Japan’s second-largest mobile operator KDDI began early in the morning on Saturday, July 2, and lasted the entire weekend. Most mobile network services were affected, with the outage affecting 39 million users. Internet and data services were restored on Monday, July 4, but communication services were still experiencing difficulties. The outage, which appeared to be caused by a technical failure, affected a wide range of services in Japan, from weather forecasting to delivery services to banking.

• Canadian operator Rogers Wireless outage (Canada, 7 p.m.)

July 8, 2022 Rogers Wireless announced the largest outage in Canadian history, affecting 25 percent of the Canadian population. It affected both cable internet and mobile networks, as well as the entire infrastructure that used them, including payment services, hospitals, banks and access to emergency calls. The outage occurred during an update to the operator’s main Internet network and was probably caused by a faulty external routing protocol (BGP), which allows the exchange of routing information between autonomous systems via border routers.

• Outage of UK operator 02 UK and Japan’s Softbank (UK and Japan, 6pm)

December 6, 2018 operators 02 UK and Sotfbank suffered an outage that lasted almost 18 hours and affected their communication and data services. The cause was apparently the expiry of the certificate of Ericsson’s main network software used by both operators. Millions of users in Britain and Japan were among those affected.

• Australian operator Optus outage (Australia, almost 14 hours)

November 8, 2023 Optus, Australia’s second largest telecommunications service provider, suffered a widespread outage. It temporarily caused chaos in the country before services began to be restored. About ten million people use one of the company’s services, which is roughly 40 percent of the Australian population. The company does not suspect a cyber attack. Almost half of Australians were without internet or telephone connection, both wireless and traditional, for most of the day. Problems arose when paying in shops, in transport or in medical facilities.

• China Telecom outage (China, almost five hours)

May 13, 2019 China’s state-owned China Telecom experienced a widespread outage that affected both its network in China and the company’s network in Singapore and several locations in the United States, including Los Angeles. More than a hundred services were affected, leading American brands Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Slack also experienced certain problems related to the outage.

• Dutch operator KPN outage (Netherlands, more than three hours)

June 24, 2019 hit a major outage in telephone services in the Netherlands, including emergency lines. It started around 4:00 PM and lasted for more than three hours. The outage occurred in the network of the Dutch operator KPN, but it also affected other telecommunications service providers that use KPN’s infrastructure. The outage left many businesses and offices unreachable by phone. The cause of the outage was not clarified, but according to KPN, there was no indication that the problems were caused by a cyber attack.