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The 10 Worst Cloud Outages Of 2013

OC Cloud9 > News & Articles > Uncategorized > The 10 Worst Cloud Outages Of 2013

The 10 Worst Cloud Outages Of 2013

Jan 8, 2014DeborahUncategorized

Cloud Outages are inevitable and everyone is susceptible. The bigger the provider the more likely the outage.

Large companies from Verizon to Microsoft to Amazon were all subject to outages in 2013. These outages varied from a few minutes to  days. They caused companies to lose millions and gain frustrated customers. Here’s a look back at the biggest cloud outages of the past year.

10. Dropbox

On Jan. 10, Dropbox kicked off 2013 with a cloud outage that resulted in the online file storage service going offline for more than 15 hours.

On January 13th they had another outage that affected “Creating/joining shared folders, and creating share able links to files.” The outages were from a synchronization problem between client software and servers.

The company had another global cloud outage at the end of May, which only lasted for an hour.

9. SCORM Cloud

A planned upgrade to the SCORM cloud to improve performance cut service to the cloud for more than three hours on March 14 when mistakes were made in the roll out. The update was designed to improve performance by changing how the cloud handles caching, but the changes caused a failure in a crucial Amazon server.

8. Amazon Web Services

September 13th, regional Amazon Web Services had an outage due to a load balancing issue. The service was only down for about two hours and affected only a single availability zone in Virginia.

7. Microsoft Mail Services

A firmware update took down Microsoft’s Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive services on March 13 for approximately 16 hours.

A result of this update was a large temperature spike in the Data center which made a safeguard come into place on servers. The safeguards blocked users’ access to their email and files.

6. Apple iCloud

On April 9  iMessage and FaceTime services were out for some users, and it returned on the same services just three days later. A week later, the Apple iTunes Store and Game Center had experienced outages. Also part of the outage were reports that a small percentage of users couldn’t send emails through icloud.com for up to 27 hours.

Apple wrapped up the month with an iCloud-based services outage, which included disruptions to login, email and iTunes services, among others. The outage spanned more than five hours in some areas.

5. Microsoft Azure, Part 1 And 2

On February 29th,  Microsoft Azure outage kicked some users out completely and left others unable to manage applications for more than eight hours. Microsoft said the outage was due to a “cert issue” related to a time calculation problem around the Leap Year day. Later in the year, a partial outage on Oct. 30 left Azure Computer cloud users unable to upload files or manage websites hosted on the Azure servers. Crediting the outage to a sub-component of the system that took out service worldwide, Microsoft had the issue resolved, with lingering partial outages in FTP services, after more than 20 hours of problems.

4. Amazon.com

An approximately 49 minute outage in August cost Amazon a staggering $5 million in potentially lost revenue, and although it wasn’t a long outage, it certainly was an expensive one. While other pages of the site appeared to be working, the gateway page of the e-commerce site was down. On the bright side for Amazon, the outage didn’t appear to touch Amazon Web Services, which remained running during the site outage.

3. Google

On Aug. 16, all of Google.com services were down for less than five minutes. In that time, reports said that the volume of global Internet traffic plummeted around 40 percent.

From March 18th to the 20th, Google Drive was down intermittently for a grand total of 17 hours due to a glitch in the network control software. The outage impacted around one-third of Google customers.  Then on September 23rd, Gmail experienced a 12-hour outage that hit around a third of its user base.

2. Yahoo Mail

Starting on Dec. 9 and going all the way through to Dec. 13, Yahoo users were unable to access their free email accounts.

Yahoo has been trying to reinvent itself with their new CEO Marissa Mayer. This came as a major set back from the reinventing.

1. Verizon Terremark

A Verizon Terremark outage on Oct. 27 caused yet another blow to the Affordable Care Act site, which has been struggling since its launch at the beginning of October. Verizon Terremark was in charge of hosting the site’s database hub. Verizon vaguely attributed the outage to a “failure in a networking component.”

A month later, reports said that the Department of Human Services decided not to renew its contract with Verizon and instead signed a $38 million contract with HP’s Enterprise Services unit for hosting going forward.

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It seems that almost all Large Scale Cloud Service Providers has had issues this year. Minor infrastructure hiccups are inevitable regardless of the service provider. The point here is that service is everything! If you want to sit on hold for hours and speak to someone across the globe, then a Big Service Provider is a perfect fit for you. The OC CLoud9 Team is a mere phone call away. We don’t outsource our services.

We offer a wide menu of Cloud Solutions such as Hosted Exchange, Virtual Server, Hosted Applications and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure within our custom Private Cloud Environment or yours. Contact a member of our OC Cloud 9  team at 949-699-6619 or via email for more information.

Written by Deborah

Deborah is the Director of Network Operations at OC Cloud 9. She oversees the daily Operations of the company. She has been working with Orange County Computer, Inc., the parent company of OC Cloud9, Inc., since 2003. Prior to working in the IT Industry, her area of expertise was in regulatory compliance in the Healthcare Industry working with state and federal regulatory agencies. She acts as our interpreter regarding all HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. Deborah's office mantra is "Keep the client happy" and she will act as the liaison between a client request and a technical barrier to resolving as issue. She is happy to help. In her spare time, you might find her paddle boarding in the ocean or skiing in the mountains.

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