According to CRN Technology News outages are not that prevalent and pervasive as they were in recent years. But on the other side this does not mean, that todays outages have become more harmless. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. DevOpps.com estimates the yearly costs of downtime to one Million Dollar (minimum!).
Here comes our compilation of the Top Ten Outages in 2015 in chronological order:
1. Verizon Cloud (January)
This downtime was on full purpose and endured for 40 hours. The reason was an upscaling of the cloud infrastructure which was applied to prevent major downtimes in future time.
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2. Google (February, plus)
Many IaaS offers were not available in February for several hours. Google apologised for the inconvenience the outage may have caused. But at the same time they did not say anything about the reasoning. Google also faced major outages in March, October and November,
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3. AOL (February)
No access to the mail accounts for several hours. Customers in England but also in the US were affected from AOLs widespread downtime. AOL said a network issue has caused the problems.
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4. Apple (March)
No music, no books, no apps for customers around the world. Both iTunes and APP store plus some iCloud email accounts were affected for almost half a day. What was the reason? Apple said that an internal DNS error was responsible for the downtime. Apple faced another major outage in May affecting more than 500 Million iCloud users.
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5. Microsoft (March, plus)
Azure went down. Two public cloud services were not available for two hours in the US. Next to the Azure Cloud services also the IaaS offerings were affected. Microsoft very vaguely described it as a partial service interruption. No 24 hours later another outage hit Microsoft Azure. This time a problem with the storages caused an outage that affected mainly people on the US East Coast. In July Microsoft faced another major downtime during its worldwide partner conference – which main topic ironically was on cloud stability.
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6. Starbucks (April)
The coffee machine still was running, although Starbucks was unable to sell coffee to its customers. The CRM system of Starbucks broke down and made it unable for many stores in North America to cash register. Some stores closed early that day, others gave their coffee out for free. According to Starbucks the reason was a failure caused by a daily system refresh.
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7. Level 3 (June)
A service disruption on Level 3’s global fibre networks had vast consequences around the world. It slowed down the internet in UK, France, Germany and Italy as well as the US according to Computer Weekly.
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8. Amazon (August)
Amazon’s web service (AWS) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC) went down for several hours, causing interruption of service for web services such as Github. Previous outages show how many popular sites and services run with AWS, e.g. Airbnb, Vine, Netflix or Tinder.
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9. Facebook (September)
Only a blank page. Customers were unable to reach their facebook profile and stream. The service interruption also had an effect to its popular photo service instagram. But that’s not all: Facebook had to fight with downtime three times throughout September. The cause might have been originated to failure in the knowledge graphs according to venturebeat.com..
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10. Slack (November)
No talking. The popular collaboration tool Slack went down one afternoon in November. Slack is used for sending group messages, creating chat rooms and has been becoming increasingly popular in the course of the last two years. Slack did not provide specific causes for its service interruption.
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Primary Sources
CRN.com – The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2015 (So Far)
talkingcloud.com – 7 Worst Cloud Outages Of 2015 (So Far)



