The failures can be the responsibility of customer/service provider, vendor/supplier, utility, government, contractor, end customer, public individual, act of nature, other (none of the above but known), or unknown.
Corporations can lose business due to network outage or they may default on a contract, resulting in financial losses.
[1] Those people or organizations that are affected by downtime can be more sensitive to particular aspects: The most demanding users are those that require high availability.
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.
[6] 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 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.
This simultaneously affected cell phone and internet access, causing 911 calls, interbank transactions to fail and also disrupting government services.
On July 19th, 2024, CrowdStrike issued a faulty device driver update for their Falcon software, resulting in Windows PCs, servers, and virtual machines to crash and boot loop.
The incident unintentionally affected approximately 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide, including critical infrastructure such as 911 services in various states.
A process needs to be in place to detect a malfunction - network monitoring - and to restore the network to a working condition - this generally involves a help desk team that can troubleshoot a problem, one composed of trained engineers; a separate help desk team is usually necessary in order to field user input, which can be particularly demanding during a downtime.
A network management system can be used to detect faulty or degrading components prior to customer complaints, with proactive fault rectification.
Automation tools are available to manage backups, but there are very few solutions that handle configuration recovery which is needed to minimize the overall impact of the outage.