Outage Outrage
It seems that every other day, there is another major Web services outage. The latest victim is Microsoft, which recently saw a bunch of e-mail services go down, including Hotmail, Office365, SkyDrive and more. Most of the problems were in Europe or Asia, but they spilled over to North America, as well.
It only took hours to get most services back up, but it took a number of days for Microsoft to explain itself. It turns out a DNS error was the culprit. Most of the downed services were not enterprise-class and clearly not mission-critical.
Nonetheless, outages like this put the scare in IT. While most users were down for a few hours, I heard from one customer who claims he was down for five days. That could be out-of-business time. One IT pro, a Live@EDU customer, had two outages just days apart. Still, it is nice to see that Microsoft explained what happened, just as Amazon did with its two more recent outages.
Do you trust the cloud? What steps can you take to make sure you don't suffer when it goes down? Best advice welcome at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 09/13/2011 at 12:47 PM