Biggest Cloud Outages of 2020
When it comes to a company’s IT systems there is no dirtier word that “outage”. It can lead to a complete stoppage of communications, productivity, and revenue generation with each passing minute. While cloud-based systems provide far better protection against outages than traditional on-premesis systems they are not 100% resistant to failure. Because of this cloud-to-cloud backup is highly recommended. Unsure if it’s worth the investment? Let’s look to the biggest cloud outages of 2020 as evidence that your organization absolutely needs to add another layer of support to your cloud-based solutions.
5 Most Notable Cloud-Based Productivity Tool Outages of 2020
Google made big news in the IT space as 2020 came to and end, and it wasn’t because they launched some exciting new feature to their platform. On December 14 Google and ALL of its services went down for nearly an hour during one of the busiest times of the year. In addition to Google Search going down, Google Workspace tools including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet and more were inaccessible. This was a huge deal because not only were organizations who use Google Workspace vulnerable, any company depending on Google to get customers/clients were at risk of losing business because the entire platform was offline. View more on why you need to backup Google Workspace, even though it boasts 99.99% uptime.
Microsoft Azure
Like Google, even Microsoft is not entirely resilient to outages, as Azure cloud services went down for 6 hours on March 3rd for a number of U.S. and Canada based organizations. Microsoft disclosed that a cooling system disruption was to blame, showing that something as simple as an HVAC failure can take down one of the world’s largest tech companies. This event was followed by another series of outages (for European customers) between March 24-26 which were caused by high volume strains on several cloud services due to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. View more on why you need to backup Microsoft business solutions.
IBM Cloud
On June 9 IBM Cloud (aka Big Blue) experienced a worldwide cloud services outage due to a third party provider failure. A number of big websites went down as a result, evidencing that no matter how well your company’s IT infrastructure has been built, vulnerabilities are introduced when depending upon 3rd parties for a variety of other IT services. Get a better cloud backup solution to mitigate this risk.
Zoom
While this outage may not have been as significant when compared to the other outages on this list, “Zoom” will be remembered as one of the biggest names to come out of 2020. The growth of this communications application is the perfect example of how COVID-19 forced digital transformation and rapidly accelerated adoption of technology among even the most “old school” of mom & pop operations. On August 24 Zoom experienced a partial outage that prevented users from accessing meetings and video webinars. Such is the unfortunate side effect of increased usage of many tech-based services.
Within a few short hours the cloud-based service returned to fully-operational status, but the analogy was made clear – any company experiencing unexpected volume must be prepared through a more scalable cloud based service.
Slack
This may have happened in the first “business day” of 2021 but there’s no way we could wait until the same time next year to add this to a list of biggest outages. Nearly 650,000 SMBs worldwide use Slack, with the majority of these companies based in North America (namely U.S. and Canada). On January 4th Slack slacked-off, ranging from all out inaccessibility to slow functioning for an estimated 6 hours. Given that organizations using Slack have Google and Outlook calendar integrations many experienced issues with email – and therefore customer, client, and team communications – for far too long on the opening workday of the new year.
Contact SAV Technology today for complete peace of mind that your data and productivity solutions remain accessible at all times.