Sending your IT business to the cloud comes with risk, as those affected by these 10 colossal cloud outages can attest
Is that a reason to run, arms flailing, away from anything cloud-connected? Probably not. But it is a reason to look carefully at your own data safeguards and think about setting up a backup or offline-access solution now, before an urgent need arises.
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“When you look at broad averages, the cloud will have a lot more operational success than you would as an individual,” says AlertSite’s Ken Godskind. “It’s just that when you go to Web scale, the impact of failure is amplified in a much greater way.”
Colossal cloud outage No. 4: Hotmail’s hot mess. Of course, Microsoft hasn’t always provided the greatest advertisement for its big push for the cloud, either. Witness Microsoft’s Hotmail service, which experienced database errors of its own at the end of 2010, resulting in tens of thousands of empty inboxes at the turn of the new year.
The error, according to Microsoft, stemmed from a script that was meant to delete dummy accounts created for automated testing. The script mistakenly targeted 17,000 real accounts instead.
It took Microsoft three days to restore service for most of those users. An unlucky 8 percent of affected emailers had to wait an extra three days before their data was back where it belonged.
Even Clippy couldn’t smile through a headache like that.
Colossal cloud outage No. 5: The Intuit double-down. Intuit hit a rough patch last year when its cloud-connected services, including popular platforms like TurboTax, Quicken, and QuickBooks, went offline twice within a single month. The worst case was a 36-hour outage in June. A power failure evidently caused things to go haywire, with the company’s primary and backup systems getting knocked completely off the grid.
It only added insult to injury, then, when another apparent power failure hit Intuit weeks later. Among other issues, the second outage appeared to cause an abnormally high rate of obscenity-laden shouting.
“Twenty-five hours downtime is hard to swallow,” one user tweeted at the time. “Passive, opaque and stiff communication from Intuit didn’t help.”
Ouch.
“The truth is, there are better solutions than a single cloud if you need absolute availability,” says Chris Whitener, chief strategist of HP’s Secure Advantage program. “It’s not necessarily that you have to duplicate everything, but even putting one extra step in there — maybe backing up crucial data yourself — can make all the difference.”
Colossal cloud outage No. 6: Microsoft’s BPOS oops. It’s hard to be productive when your cloud-based productivity suite bites the virtual dust. That’s what happened to organizations relying on Microsoft’s business cloud offering just weeks ago: The service, named — in true Microsoft style — Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, started to stutter around May 10. Paying customers’ email was delayed by as much as nine hours as a result.
Two days later, just when it looked like BPOS was in the clear, the delay returned and outgoing messages started getting stuck in the pipeline, too. If that weren’t enough, Microsoft experienced a separate issue that prevented users from logging into its Web-based Outlook portal as well.
