- The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is established.
- February 6 – Markale massacres: a Bosnian Serb Army mortar shell kills 68 civilians and wounds about 200 in a Sarajevo marketplace.
- March – The People’s Republic of China gets its first connection to the Internet.[3]
- May 6 – The Channel Tunnel, which took 15,000 workers more than seven years to complete, opens between England and France, enabling passengers to travel between the two countries in 35 minutes.
- June 12 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman are murdered outside the Simpson home in Los Angeles. O. J. Simpson is later acquitted of the killings, but is held liable in a civil suit.
- July 5 – Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.
- November 28 – Voters in Norway decide not to join the European Union in a referendum.
- December 14 – Construction commences on the Three Gorges Dam, at Sandouping, China.
- December 19
- A planned exchange rate correction of the Mexican peso to the US dollar, becomes a massive financial meltdown in Mexico, unleashing the ‘Tequila‘ effect on global financial markets. This prompts a US$50 billion “bailout” by the Clinton Administration.
- Civil unions between same-sex couples are legalized in Sweden.
- Online service America Online offers gateway to World Wide Web for the first time. This marked the beginning of easy accessibility of the Web to the average American.