Cloud Solution outages that impaired the tech world in 2018

Cloud services platforms are getting popular today. It is not only becoming a vital part for companies globally, but also an essential tool for the future existence of the IT resources on a network. Whether you are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or supporting the critical operations of your business, a cloud services platform provides rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. With cloud computing, you don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your IT department. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.

However, in 2018, the world saw the cloud services’s dark side. Some unexpected cloud systems have knocked even the most prominent cloud providers, causing embarrassment and abundant resources pulling all around.

Major Cloud Solution Platforms Of 2018

Google Cloud

Many products and services nowadays depend on platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud and if their cloud goes down or runs into a problem, it not only affects the companies but also its customer base. And unfortunately, in July 2018, Google Cloud witnessed an outrage that caused headaches for some of the popular platforms like Snapchat, Spotify, and Pokemon Go.  

According to Google’s status page, the search giant has stated that the outage started at 12:17 on 17 July 2018 and ended at 12:55 on the same day (times are US/Pacific).

Discord, a free VoIP application and digital distribution platform for video gaming communities, said the issue was completely due to Google outage, however, other platforms like Snapchat, Spotify, and Pokemon Go didn’t mention Google.

Even though the issue lasted for almost an hour, Google took quick actions and fixed the problem. “The issue with Google App Engine should be resolved for some users and we expect a full resolution in the near future,” said Google in an update.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

On March 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was hit by a cloud outage that silenced Amazon’s Alexa and affected hundreds of enterprise services including Atlassian, Slack, and Twilio. The outage happened in the important region of data centers in Virginia when the Direct Connect dedicated links from AWS North Virginia region to other server warehouses and premises on the East Coast got disabled.

The outage wasn’t the only thing Amazon was dealing with, Twitter was also going crazy with some of the funniest tweets in response to the AWS outage. 

That is not all. In May 2018, Amazon was hit by another outage - it witnessed a critical connectivity issue due to some hardware failure in a data centre in North Virginia. And AWS’ EC2, Relational Database Service, Workspaces, and Redshift were all impacted by the outage.

The same day, Amazon in an update said, “customers with EC2 instances in the availability zone may see issues with connectivity to the affected instances.” 

However, the company took the necessary measures to deal with the issue and restored power to the vast majority of the affected instances.

Slack

Slack was running fine after its May outage that lasted for around 20 minutes — it had a 100% uptime throughout the month of June 2018, however, at the end of the month, the workplace messaging platform suffered a Global outage and the according to the company, the reason was a connectivity issue.  

“We’ve received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack. We’re currently investigating the issue, and will have updates shortly,” Slack confirmed on its website. 

With a massive customer base of organisations and people, Slack is a renowned platform and even a small outage can cause great loss to all its customers. So, when Slack was down, people lost their minds and to respond to the global outage, they took it to Twitter. 

Microsoft Azure

Announced in 2008, Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud computing service and over the years, it has gained tremendous popularity. In June 2018, Microsoft Azure suffered a critical outage overnight and it affected the platform’s storage and networking services.  The outage affected the Northern Europe region and the reason behind it was an underlying temperature issue in one of the data centers in the region.

According to the company, the outage started at 5.45 PM and lasted till 4.30 AM. However, it seemed that many customers faced issues for a long-time despite Azure Support claiming that engineers had “mitigated the issue and impacted services should be recovered at this time”.

Witnessing all the complaints, Microsoft quickly did the needful and it was back in normal. But, just after two months, Microsoft suffered another outage caused by a severe lightning storm in the San Antonio. Azure’s South-Central US data centre region was down for quite a while. Customers across the world using Active Directory and Visual Studio Team Services faced trouble for more than 24 hours.

FINAL INTERPRETATION

Whether it is due to a human error or natural disaster, when it comes to cloud, expect outage. So, why not be prepared for the downtime. And when talking about being prepared, it starts with knowing all the pieces of your organization’s technical chain which includes network, servers, load balancers, applications, DB, other third-party vendors etc. Knowing the chain will not only help you prepare a back-up but also help you prepare it fast. After all what is about the recovery planning and fulfillment of loss factors.