Outages can disrupt security tools and critical services, showing how failures in infrastructure, vendors, or recovery plans affect cyber resilience.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Outage is a period when a system, network, application, or online service is unavailable or cannot perform its intended function. It may be planned maintenance or an unplanned disruption caused by equipment or software failure, misconfiguration, a dependency problem, natural hazards, or a denial-of-service attack. The tag generally concerns availability incidents, not every performance issue or security breach.
For security practitioners, an outage requires determining whether malicious activity contributed to the disruption while preserving relevant logs, network telemetry, and system state for investigation. Defenses include capacity planning, segmented and redundant architecture, tested failover and recovery procedures, and controls that limit the effect of DDoS traffic or compromised dependencies. Emergency changes made during recovery should be authorized and recorded, since they can create new vulnerabilities or affect data integrity. Clear incident ownership and communications help coordinate technical response without obscuring the cause or scope.
A lot of news broke this week related to ransomware, with the discovery of LockBit testing macOS encryptors to an outage on NCR, causing massive headaches for restaurants. [...]
Microsoft is investigating an ongoing outage blocking customers worldwide from accessing and using web apps and online services. [...]
Google Search is currently suffering a partial outage that prevents the search engine from returning search results for some people. [...]