https://itworkedyesterday.com A curated archive of technical incidents en https://itworkedyesterday.com/ebay-1999-outage https://itworkedyesterday.com/ebay-1999-outage Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT In 1999, eBay was growing faster than almost any company on the internet. Millions of auctions were live at any moment, and the platform was becoming critical infrastructure for its users. To keep up, the company invested heavily in a new backend system designed to handle the scale. https://itworkedyesterday.com/janet-jackson-rhythm-nation-laptop-crash https://itworkedyesterday.com/janet-jackson-rhythm-nation-laptop-crash Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT A major laptop manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" could crash certain models of laptop. https://itworkedyesterday.com/early-google-adwords-billing-bug https://itworkedyesterday.com/early-google-adwords-billing-bug Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT In 2000, Ron Garrett discovered Google the way people discovered things back then: from a random Usenet comment. https://itworkedyesterday.com/500-mile-email https://itworkedyesterday.com/500-mile-email Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT In the early 2000s, a university's statistics department reported a problem with their email system: they couldn't send email more than 500 miles. It wasn't approximate or intermittent; there appeared to be a hard limit. Messages sent to nearby cities worked fine, while messages sent further away consistently failed. Somewhere around 500 miles, email simply stopped working.