The 10 Biggest cloud services outages of 2016

Everything fails. Outages will happen.

Regardless it’s a big company or a small blog, the fact is that it will fail.

It’s obvious that, as more is invested in technology and solutions, less risk is present. But no company, no matter its size, is totally free of the risk of facing big failures and outages.

Bellow, we list the 10 biggest cloud services outages of 2016 that impacted huge companies and millions of users.

The 10 Biggest Outages

• Verizon: January 14, a power outage at a data center that impacted JetBlue Airways operations;
• Twitter: January 19, 8hrs of outage due to the deployment of faulty code;
• Microsoft Office 365: January 18 and February 22, many days of email service outage due to buggy software update and heavy demand;
• Salesforce: March 3, 8hrs of CRM service outage due to a storage problem;
• Symantec Cloud: April 11, 24hrs of outage due to a database crash;
• Google Cloud Platform: April 11, 18min of cloud services outage due to a wrong configuration;
• Salesforce: May 10, 4hrs of CRM service outage; root cause not published;
• Apple: June 2, 3hrs of iCloud and AppStore services outage; root cause not informed.
• Amazon Web Services: June 4, 10hrs of outage in Australian AWS availability region due to power issues;
• Microsoft Azure: September 15, several hours of outage due to a global DNS issue.

Impact

There are some different kind of impacts resulted from a service outage. In resume, the impacts to the clients are the loss of money and the impact on the brand’s trust.

The impact to the client’s business is easily represented as the loss of money for the clients due to the downtime. Depending on the size of the clients’ businesses, that impact is crucial.

But there is also the other impact, resulting in the loss of trust in the client’s brand name. Trust is, somehow, one of the most important assets of a company: it affects how new clients tend to hire services and how current clients feel happy with them. When an outage occurs and a service gets unavailable for hours, it affects directly the trust in the company, leading clients to look for different providers. Outages that occurs too often can seriously drain that trust.

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