Network outages typically last between a few minutes to over a few hours, although some network outages can last longer.
The actual time that a network outage will last, will depend on the cause and how widespread the network outage is.
Some network outages only last a couple of minutes to 30 minutes and some other major network outages can last a few hours or even 24 hours to 48 hours.
Minor network outages up last minutes to 1 hour and major infrastructure and service outages can last 24 hours to several days.
The largest IT outage in history was the 2024 CrowdStrike Related IT outage.
The 2024 CrowdStrike Related IT outage occurred on July 19th 2024, when a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused around 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems to crash worldwide.
As a result of the 2024 CrowdStrike Related IT outage, a blue screen of death or BSOD was displayed.
A defective content updated, for the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software on Windows hosts caused the outage.
Roughly 8.5 million machines crashed as a result of the fault with the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor Software,, which also halted critical infrastructure.
And the outage also impacted major systems and caused massive global disruption to airlines, banks, hospitals, broadcasters and retail systems.
The 2024 CrowdStrike Related IT outage was not a cyberattack or malicious and instead it was simply a malfunction in a routine update.
Over 2,000 flights were canceled and major airlines like United Airlines, Delta Airlines and American Airline issued ground stops.
Hospitals even postponed elective surgeries and lost access to their computer systems.
Banks and credit card payment terminals also failed, which disrupted transactions.
And even TV stations, went offline, 911 call centers also experienced glitches and logistics networks stalled.
In 2023, services connected to Cloudflare were unavailable for 121 minutes as a result of a code deployment error.
In 2021, meta platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook went down for hours as a result of configuration changes.
In 2020, a 45 minute outage also took down YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive.
And in 2016, a massive DDoS attack affected major websites in the United States.