2008

* January 14 – At 19:04:39 UTC, the unmanned MESSENGER space probe is at its closest approach during its first flyby of the planet Mercury.
* January 21 – Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.
* January 24 – A peace deal is signed in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, ending the Kivu conflict.

### February

* February 4 – Iran opens its first space center and launches a rocket into space.
* February 13 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivers a formal apology to the Stolen Generations.
* February 17 – Kosovo formally declares independence from Serbia, with a mixed response from the international community.

### March

* March–April – Rising food and fuel prices trigger riots and unrest in the Third World.
* March 2 – Venezuela and Ecuador move troops to the Colombian border, following a Colombian raid against FARC guerrillas inside Ecuadorian territory, in which senior commander Raúl Reyes is killed.
* March 9 – The first European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicle, a cargo spacecraft for the International Space Station, launches from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.
* March 24 – Bhutan holds its first-ever general elections following the adoption of a new Constitution which changed the country from an absolute monarchy to a multiparty democracy.
* March 25 – African Union and Comoros forces invade the rebel-held island of Anjouan, returning the island to Comorian control.

### April

* April 22 – Surgeons at London's Moorfields Eye Hospital perform the first successful operations using bionic eyes, implanting them into two blind patients.

### May

* May 2 – The Chaitén volcano in Chile enters a new eruptive phase for the first time since around 1640.
* May 3 – Cyclone Nargis passes through Myanmar, killing more than 138,000 people.
* May 12 – An earthquake measuring 7.9 on the moment magnitude scale strikes Sichuan, China, killing an estimated 87,000 people.
* May 23
	+ The Union of South American Nations, an intergovernmental organization between states in South America, is founded.
	+ The International Court of Justice awards Middle Rocks to Malaysia and Pedra Branca to Singapore, ending a 29-year territorial dispute between the two countries.
* May 25 – NASA's unmanned *Phoenix* spacecraft becomes the first to land on the northern polar region of Mars.
* May 28 – The Legislature Parliament of Nepal votes overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the country's 240-year-old monarchy, turning the country into a republic.
* May 30 – The Convention on Cluster Munitions is adopted in Dublin.

### June

* June 7–29 – Austria and Switzerland jointly host the UEFA Euro 2008 football tournament, which is won by Spain.
* June 11
	+ The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is launched.
	+ Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologizes, on behalf of the Canadian government, to the country's First Nations for the Canadian Indian residential school system.
* June 14 – Expo 2008 opens in Zaragoza, Spain, lasting to September 14, with the topic "Water and sustainable development".

### July

* July 2 – Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages are rescued from FARC rebels by Colombian security forces.
* July 21 – Radovan Karadžic, the first president of the Republika Srpska, is arrested in Belgrade, Serbia, on allegations of war crimes, following a 12-year-long manhunt.

### August

* August 1 – Eleven mountaineers from international expeditions die on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth in the worst single accident in the history of K2 mountaineering.
* August 6 – President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi of Mauritania is deposed in a military coup d'état.
* August 7 – Georgia invades the breakaway state of South Ossetia, sparking a war with Russia as the latter intervenes in support of the separatists in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
* August 20 – Spanair Flight 5022 crashes at Madrid–Barajas Airport, killing 154 people on board.
* August 8–24 – The 2008 Summer Olympics take place in Beijing, China.

### September

* September 10 – The proton beam is circulated for the first time in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, located at CERN, near Geneva, under the Franco-Swiss border.
* September 13 – Hurricane Ike makes landfall in Galveston, Texas.
* September 20 – A suicide truck bomb explosion destroys the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing at least 54 and injuring 266.
* September 28 – SpaceX Falcon 1 becomes the world's first privately developed space launch vehicle to successfully make orbit.
* September 29 – Following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 777.68 points, hitherto the largest single-day point loss in its history.

### October

* October 3 – Global financial crisis: U.S. President George W. Bush signs the revised Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law, creating a 700 billion dollar Treasury fund to purchase failing bank assets.
* October 7 – The Spotify music streaming service is launched in Sweden.
* October 21 – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is officially inaugurated at Geneva.
* October 22 – The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully launches the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft on a lunar exploration mission.

### November

* November 1 – Satoshi Nakamoto publishes "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
* November 4 – Democratic U.S. Senator Barack Obama is elected the 44th President of the United States, becoming the first black President of the United States.
* November 19 – Claudia Castillo of Spain becomes the first person to have a successful trachea transplant using a tissue-engineered organ.
* November 26–29 – Members of Lashkar-e-Taiba carry out four days of coordinated bombing and shooting attacks across Mumbai, killing 164 people.

### December

* December 5 – Human remains found in 1991 are identified as Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, using DNA analysis.
* December 10 – The Channel Island of Sark, a British Crown dependency, holds its first fully democratic elections under a new constitutional arrangement, becoming the last European territory to abolish feudalism.
* December 18 – The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Théoneste Bagosora and two other senior Rwandan army officers guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentences them to life imprisonment for their role in the Rwandan genocide.
* December 23 – A military coup d'état deposes the government of Guinea shortly after the death of longtime President Lansana Conté.
* December 27 – Israel invades the Gaza Strip in response to rockets being fired into Israeli territory by Hamas and due to weapons being smuggled into the area.
* December 31 – An extra leap second (23:59:60) is added to end the year. The last time this occurred was in 2005.