Even the most prominent cloud providers have had their bad days. From service disruptions that have lasted for hours to a loss of customer data, unexpected cloud disasters have hit the most popular of cloud vendors. Take Amazon Web Services (AWS), for instance. The market leader for public cloud took a major blow a few days ago, causing embarrassment all around. The reasons have been myriad—from power outages to data centers going bust to human errors. They have left behind a bad aftertaste of utter disruption of personal and professional lives.
Here’s how cloud computing misfires impacted the world in recent times:
1. Salesforce goes down:
On May 9, 2016, the Silicon Valley NA14 instance of Salesforce.com went offline, resulting in an outage that lasted for more than 24 hours. Extensive business damage was inevitable, with customers losing hours and hours of data. Salesforce moved to Amazon Web Services for most of its workloads thereafter as a result.
2. A bad Christmas for Netflix:
It was Christmas Eve in 2012, a time of cheer and uninterrupted entertainment that families looked forward to. However, AWS’s Elastic Load Balancing service went awry, resulting in Netflix downtime. The aftermath was a whole bunch of disgruntled customers who were depending on the streaming service for a good Christmas. As if this souring relationship between Netflix and AWS was not enough, two years later Netflix rebooted 218 of its production nodes during an AWS update, and 22 failed to reboot—an additional instance of differences between AWS and Netflix.
3. Microsoft Azure goes bust:
On November 18, 2014, the Azure Storage Service was hit by a massive outage as a result of software updates for performance increases. A similar one followed in December, 2015.
4. Dyn sees a bad day:
On October 21, 2016, Dyn DNS underwent a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Dozens of websites and their businesses were hit, such as those of Airbnb, Twitter, Amazon, Ancestry, Netflix, and PayPal. This alerted the world to the practical threat of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) attacks.
5. The Office 360 joke:
Now this is an ongoing discredit given to Microsoft’s Office 365. On June 30, 2016, scores of Office 365 clients saw their email services going offline for more than 12 hours. In the past too, several similar instances followed throughout 2015 and continued through 2016. The standing joke persists that Office 365 is indeed Office 360, with an average downtime of five days off a year.
6. Healthcare takes a hit:
Stories abound of the HealthCare.gov website frequently crashing due to poor design. Other cited reasons are lack of resources and demand exceeding supply. It turns out that problems with the cloud had let down the crucial government service that caters to public health. Clearly, it is not in the best state of health itself.
There are enough and more instances that indicate the widespread damage that faulty cloud computing mechanisms can cause. While some may be temporary, like email downtime, others are long-lasting and high-impact. It is high time that IT experts decode how to fortify the cloud to make it as infallible as possible. Only then can one expect businesses to place their faith in the cloud.