What happened in 2012

World7

• Jan 4The Cicada 3301 internet hunt begins.
• Jun 5The century's second and last solar transit of Venus occurs. The next pair are predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125.
• Jun 62012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak first identified.
• Jul 23The Solar storm of 2012 is an unusually large coronal mass ejection emitted by the Sun which barely misses the Earth by nine days. If it had hit, it would have caused up to US$2.6 trillion in damages to electrical equipment worldwide.
• Aug 1Microsoft finishes development of Windows 8, with general availability announced for October 26.
• Oct 22Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter, with tropical-storm-force winds spanning 900 miles (1,400 km)), wreaks havoc, resulting in 233 total deaths and $68.7 billion (2012 USD) damage.
• Dec 16The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder, otherwise known as the Nirbhaya case, occurred on the night of December 16, 2012. The case involved the fatal assault of a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern by a group of six men in a moving bus.

Japan1

• May 22Tokyo Skytree, the tallest self-supporting tower in the world at 634 metres high, is opened to the public.

North America10

• Jan 18As part of a series of protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, the English Wikipedia, along with other websites, goes dark for 24 hours, starting at midnight Eastern Standard Time (05:00 UTC).
• Feb 26Seventeen-year-old African-American student Trayvon Martin is shot to death by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman in an altercation in Sanford, Florida.
• Mar 5Air date of Kony 2012 (viral documentary film) on YouTube.
• Jul 202012 Aurora theater shooting: 12 people are killed and 58 are injured in a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The shooter, James Holmes, opens fire on a crowd during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
• Aug 6Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory mission's rover, successfully lands on Mars.
• SepThe rise of deep learningAt an image recognition contest, AlexNet by Hinton and colleagues at the University of Toronto won far ahead of the rest. It ran on gaming GPUs, and neural networks with many layers then became the main approach to image recognition.
• Oct 26Microsoft releases Windows 8 to the general public.
• Nov 62012 United States presidential election: Barack Obama is reelected President of the United States, defeating his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
• Nov 13Activision releases Call of Duty: Black Ops II.
• Dec 14Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting: Adam Lanza kills his mother before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School, shooting dead twenty students and six teachers before killing himself in Newtown, Connecticut. It becomes the deadliest school shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history.

Europe8

• Jan 12Peaceful protests begin in the Romanian city of Târgu Mureș, protesters expressing solidarity towards certain figures in the medical field and calling for the resignation of president Traian Băsescu. The protests would soon spread through all of the country, marking the start of a long civil unrest in Romania, lasting up to November 2015.
• Jan 13The passenger cruise ship Costa Concordia runs aground off the coast of Italy, causing 32 deaths.
• Mar 12A coach carrying school pupils and teachers crashes while travelling through Sierre Tunnel on the A9 motorway in western Switzerland. Of the 52 people on board, 28 are killed, among them 22 children.
• May 19Chelsea wins the 2011-12 UEFA Champions League held in Munich, Germany by beating the home side Bayern Munich in the final.
• Jun 8UEFA Euro 2012, hosted by Poland and Ukraine, begins in Warsaw, with a match between Poland and Greece, which ends 1-1.
• Jul 1The final match of the UEFA Euro 2012 takes place in Kyiv between Spain and Italy. Spain wins 4–0, achieving victorious from the third international tournament in a row, after winning UEFA Euro 2008 and the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
• Jul 27The 2012 Summer Olympics are held in London, England, United Kingdom.
• Oct 14Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner becomes the first person to break the sound barrier without any machine assistance, during a record space dive out of the Red Bull Stratos helium-filled balloon from 128,000 ft () over Roswell, New Mexico in the United States.

USSR / Russia1

• Mar 4Vladimir Putin is elected President of Russia.

Asia16

• Feb 6A magnitude 6.7 earthquake strike in the central Philippines island of Negros, leaving 112 people dead.
• Apr 11An 8.6 earthquake strikes Indonesia triggering a small tsunami that hits the coast of Aceh.
• Apr 13Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3, a North Korean Earth observation satellite, explodes shortly after launch. The United States and other countries had called the impending launch a violation of United Nations Security Council demands. The launch was planned to mark the centenary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the republic.
• Apr 20Bhoja Air Flight 213 crashes near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, killing all 127 people on board.
• May 12The 2012 World Expo takes place in Yeosu, South Korea.
• May 22The Eurovision Song Contest 2012 takes place in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is won by Swedish entrant Loreen with the song "Euphoria".
• Jun 18Shenzhou 9, a Chinese spacecraft carrying three Chinese astronauts, including the first-ever female, docks manually with orbiting module Tiangong-1, making this the third country, after the United States and Russia, successfully to perform the mission.
• Jul 15South Korean rapper Psy releases his hit single Gangnam Style.
• Jul 30In the worst power outage in world history, the 2012 India blackouts leave 620 million people without power.
• Sep 11A series of terrorist attacks are directed against United States diplomatic missions worldwide, as well as diplomatic missions of Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In the US, opinions are divided over whether the attacks are a reaction to a YouTube trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims. In Libya, US ambassador J. Christopher Stevens is among those killed during attacks in Benghazi.
• Oct 25North Kalimantan is established as the 34th province of Indonesia.
• Nov 15After the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping succeeds Hu Jintao as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and becomes the top leader of China.
• Nov 25Typhoon Bopha, known as "Pablo" in the Philippines, kills at least 1,067 with around 838 people missing. The typhoon causes considerable damage in the island of Mindanao.
• Dec 12North Korea successfully launches satellite Kwangmyongsong-3 Unit 2.
• Dec 21The music video for Psy's "Gangnam Style" becomes the first YouTube video to reach a billion views.

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Middle East5

• Feb 1Egypt's deadliest football incident known as the Port Said Stadium riot is sparked after local Port Said Al Masry fans attack supporters of Cairo-based team Al Ahly SC. The massacre results in 74 deaths: 72 Al Ahly fans, 1 Al Masry fan and 1 police officer. Most of the deaths are caused by stabbing, fans thrown off the stands and a stampede.
• Feb 27Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh formally transfers power to Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, after a year of mass protests, ending his 33-year-long reign.
• May 25Houla massacre takes place, perpetrated by the Syrian Arab Army, with 108 being killed.
• Nov 14Israel launches Operation Pillar of Defense against the Palestinian-governed Gaza Strip, killing Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari. In the following week 140 Palestinians and five Israelis are killed in an ensuing cycle of violence. A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is announced by Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after the week-long escalation in hostilities in Southern Israel and the Gaza Strip.
• Nov 29The UN General Assembly approves a motion granting Palestine non-member observer state status.

Latin America2

• Jun 24Lonesome George, the last known individual of the Pinta Island tortoise subspecies, dies in Galápagos National Park, thus making the subspecies extinct.
• Dec 212012 phenomenon: End of 13th b'ak'tun in the Mayan calendar, supposed end of the world according to new age beliefs. Festivities took place to commemorate the event in the countries that were part of the Maya civilization (Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), with main events at Chichén Itzá in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala.

Africa6

• Mar 4A series of explosions is reported at a munitions dump in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, with at least 250 people dead.
• Mar 22The President of Mali, Amadou Toumani Touré, is ousted in a coup d'état after mutinous soldiers attack government offices.
• Apr 6The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad unilaterally declares the independence of Azawad from Mali.
• Apr 12Mutinous soldiers in Guinea-Bissau stage a coup d'état and take control of the capital city, Bissau. They arrest interim President Raimundo Pereira and leading presidential candidate Carlos Gomes Júnior in the midst of a presidential election campaign.
• Jun 3Dana Air Flight 0992, on a flight from Abuja to Lagos, Nigeria, suffered a dual-engine failure during its approach to Lagos where it crashed onto buildings, killing all 153 people on board and six on the ground.
• Dec 10The Séléka overthrows the government of the Central African Republic which leads to the outbreak of a Civil war.