Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the world has relied on technology to make life bearable and as normal as possible. However, it’s a fact technology fails us frequently, and there were many occasions during 2021 we should hope to leave behind and never see again.
There were several internet outages throughout the year that briefly put major parts of the Internet on hold. It all started in June with breakdowns of several airline websites, content delivery networks, banks, and stock exchanges.
We ended the year with a major outage of all Facebook-owned platforms, which left little room for Internet users to communicate and showed how much we all depend on a single social media company. The final blow was in December, with three consecutive outages of Amazon’s cloud service.
Apart from outages, ransomware attacks and data leaks made news every month of the year. With more people than ever relying on online services to go about their day, cyber security and cyber threats proved to be a topic that has to be taken more seriously.
Since May 2021, hackers have been targeting critical infrastructure and businesses, especially crypto platforms, demanding ransomes worth up to $600 million. One of these attacks, aimed at the Colonial Pipeline, showed just how much the US infrastructure depends on the Internet and its safety.
With humanity spending another year tackling the pandemic, it’s important to stay aware of other kinds of challenges it presents us with. Since we’ve come to depend on technology so much, we need to work on making it a safe place for everyone.
