Fire, storms, failed software updates. There are many causes for outages. All of them have in common that they produce pain for customers and companies in a highly interconnected world.
Here is a compilation of the worst outages of 2013. What makes reading such a list interesting is one question: Is there a pattern? Can we learn something from how and why these outages came about?
1. Obamas Healthcare.gov Desaster
The intentions were good: providing millions of Americans with access to public healthcare support. The implementation failed epically, both on the hardware side and on the software side. Thus, simply adding more hardware was not a solution. The website was not up and available until various software bottlenecks were identified. Until that time many Americans are frustated about a service with poor performance.
2. Visa Downtime
The financial sector is particularly affected by outages in terms of costs. Visa was hit by an outage in the beginning of the year. For most of the day visa clients in Canada can not use their credit cards due to an outage of the service provider TSS, which is one of the largest processors of card-payment transactions in North America.
3. Microsoft Mail Downtime
A software update turns out to be responsible for the hiccups of Microsoft cloud systems in March. It causes a heat in the data center and led to a non-availability up to sixteen hours of Microsoft’s web-based email services including hotmail and outlook.com.
4. Amazon.com Outage
Only one hour of amazon.com downtime in late January shows the value of high availability of services. Analysts calculate that one hour of interrupted service cost Amazon around 5 Million in lost revenue.
5. Amazon cloud hiccup affects Instagram and Vine
Software problems at one of Amazon data centers caused severe performance issues in August. Various high profile web services including Instagram, Vine, Airbnb and Netflix were not available for several hours. All of them rely on Amazon’s cloud service network. Amazon’s explained that the glitch was caused by „partial failure of a networking device“.
6. Apple Icloud outage
On April 23, many users report about problems of logging into various services operated by the icloud. Access to emails and iTunes and various other services was interrupted. Although no critical business application seemed to be impacted (with the exception of accessing business mails), these outages cause a variety of customer issues, which need to be adressed immediately. Most services were restored within several hours.
7. Dropbox hit by interruptions
The popular webstorage site was experiencing a service interruption by up to 15 hours. It led to uploading service disruption and was caused by a synchronization issue between the client software and the servers. Throught the downtime, Dropbox kept their customers informed by regularly sending tweets.
8. Google Services malfunction
In March and April, Google users encountered several interruptions. In April, a short glitch of an hour affected all three services Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Mail. According to Google the malfunction started in the GMail cloud email service (part of the problem seemed to be a login configuration flaw), which then also effected the other services. Earlier in the year Google had three outages of several hours in a single week with its Google Drive services. For an actual status go to Google Dashboard.
9. Telstra with large scale outage
Australian’s major telecommunications service provider experienced a 24 hours long outage to its cloud computing farm end of March. The problem related to storage layer which knocked out several business clients. The outage has the potential to downgrade the company’s classification as having an uptime above 99.9 percent (‘three nines’), which would mean no more downtime than 8.76 hours.
10. Facebook’s downtime
In January the facebook page was not accessible for up to three hours for its desktop users. The mobile website and apps remained availabe. Facebook announced that the downtime was the result of DNS issue that „prevented people who typed ‚facebook.com‘ into their browsers from reaching the site“.
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