Cloud Computing is just like any other computing system. There are always the risks of outages, but any business should have a “Technology Resilience and Business Continuity” planning. Every outage is a learning experience for providers and companies.
As cloud adoption and the number of regions, zones, and cloud services grow, the cloud engineering team works hard to distribute, subdivide, and make fault-tolerant. The investment in resilience can isolate the failures to regional and leave the global services seemly unaffected.
It is interesting to find out how many outages you remembered or were impacted by it in the last seven months.
January – Verizon (East Coast)
1/26, Verizon Fios experienced an outage that affected East Coast customers’ ability to access the services of Slack, Zoom, Amazon, and Google. Traffic disruption was observed around 11:30 AM. Network services started to stabilize around 12:30 PM ET. Business Insider that the interruption came from “a software issue triggered during routine network management activities.”
February – Microsoft Teams (East Coast, North and South America)
2/4, an issue prevented some North American users from joining meetings. Microsoft stated “it was resolved in the afternoon.”
DownDetector.com showed the Teams issues affecting users in numerous major cities in the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Seattle, and Boston.
2/17, Microsoft Teams was hit by a possible networking issue that led to delays in receiving chat messages and running live events for North America and South America users. It was resolved after about five hours.
February – Texas Winter Storm (Texas)
2/17, early morning, 2.7 million households were without power, according to The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.
The unscheduled power blackouts brought by a winter storm caused widespread Texas business’ IT systems. The outage lasted for at least 42 hours. Providers reported, at the time that power, internet services, and water services came and went sporadically.
March – Another Verizon Outage (East Coast)
3/3, Verizon experienced an internet outage a little after 8 AM. ET.
According to Downdetector.com, the Verizon outage impacted Washington, D.C., and Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The issue was fixed within the day.
March – Another Microsoft Outage (Global)
3/15, due to “an issue with a recent change to an authentication system,” Microsoft reported a global outage affecting the Teams collaboration app, as well as “multiple” other Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 services at 3:40 PM ET and was recovered after about 4 hours.
A map on Downdetector showed the Teams outage affecting cities including New York, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
April – Microsoft Outages (Global)
4/1, the Domain Name System (DNS) overload issues led to a cloud services outage that affected Azure, Teams, and Dynamics 365. The problem was fully mitigated after about five hours.
Microsoft said the issues occurred between about 5:30 PM and 6:30 PM ET on April 1 and mitigated as of about 10:30 PM.
4/27, Microsoft confirmed a global outage in a 6:53 AM post due to a change made. It impacted users of the Microsoft Teams video conferencing and collaboration platform. Microsoft fixed the issue the same day by 9:03 AM. ET.
April – Google Outage (Partial)
4/12, a partial outage of Google Drive and Google Docs led to high latency and other issues for some users for about three hours. It was resolved by 12:30 PM ET.
Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Meet were not affected.
June – Fastly (Global)
6/8, a service configuration issue at cloud provider Fastly impacted bulletin board website Reddit, video streaming service Twitch and several news sites, including CNN and The New York Times.
The outage started at 5:47 AM ET and was restored at 8:44 AM ET.
Downdetector.com showed complaints about outages at Hulu, Amazon, and others.
June – More Microsoft Issues (Partial)
6/11, at about 3 PM ET, the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account disclosed that Microsoft was investigating reports of an issue that was sending incoming calls “straight to voicemail” in Teams.
Subsequently, the account tweeted that Microsoft “isolated a recent change that has caused portions of infrastructure to send some Microsoft Teams calls straight to voicemail.”
June – Akamai Outage (Global)
6/17, an Akamai Technologies’ system issue caused Internet outages for global airlines, banks, and stock exchanges.
The disruption affected several large companies around the globe, including Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Bank, Australia, New Zealand Banking Group, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s website. Services for many of the impacted companies were restored within the day.
July – Akamai Outage Again (Global)
7/22, Akamai’s Edge DNS service outage disrupted a wide range of major corporate websites — from FedEx and Delta Air Lines to HSBC and McDonald’s.
At approximately 12:50 PM ET — less than an hour after the outages were reported, the “software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system” was remediated.
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Susie Chow – ITensure
Call/Text: (714) 633-9454
