The ORBIT project is about higher fault-tolerance and high availability of IT resources. Here we look into recent outages – from power disruptions to IT network outage. The goal is to provide some insight into outages, big and small as well as to try to track down the reasons for the service disruptions. At last, we always try to get some information how the organization affected by the service disruption communicated the issue to it’s clients.
We are not covering all outages we find reported, but aim to provide some kind of overview and look into the most common causes for such service disruptions.
Stories this week:
Australia
Customers of a bank in Australia could not use online banking, credit cards, ATM and other services due to a glitch in the banks software. The unavailability of banking services created problems for customers in need of cash money. The bank created a status page to inform users about the issue, still some customers vented their frustration on social media platforms such as Twitter.
More about this outage: New.com.au
Commonwealth bank restores services after meltdown wreaked chaos, leaving customers penniless
UK
Plusnet outage leaves thousands without phone and internet access
The company found out about the issue late at night and advised customers to restart their routers. For most of the customers service returned to normal, though some still reported issues.
Reason: Misconfiguration of DNS system
More about this outage: Telegraph
USA
Telephone outage affects Hospital and healthcare facilities in Waynesboro. No reasons for the unavailability for given in press reports about the problem.
More about this outage: Public Opinion
USA
Computer outage halts MVD operations. A „departmentwide computer outage“ hit New Mexico’s tax agency. The problems resulted in residents not being able to renew driver’s licenses. Additionally the online tax system was affected and not accessible for almost a day.
More about this outage: Albuquerque Journal
Worldwide
Zendesk experiencing issues with UI. User interfaces of Zendesk, a company providing software for customer services as an online offering, reported problems of the UI, resulting in some users not being able to select options. The company provided a Service Disruption overview page – after initially reporting that the issues had been resolved, the recovery back to normal lasted almost a full day. The status reports though where much more detailed and clear in this case, related to usually scarce information provided by other organizations in the face of such events.
More about this: Zendesk Status page



