We saw that no one is immune from major IT outages in 2021, not even mega titans like Google, Facebook, and Amazon AWS. The following is a recap of some of the major IT outages with widespread impact for 2021.
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) historic outage occurred on December 7, 2021 and lasted roughly 6 and a half hours. The breadth of Amazon and its reach caused not only their warehouse and delivery operations to stop. It also impacted many websites owned and affiliated with the company, such as Twitch. tv and Whole Foods. Additionally sites like Netflix, Slack, and other major tech companies were affected too.
GitHub, a tool used by companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and thousands of developers, suffered an outage on November 27, 2021, that lasted 2 hours. This halted operations, API requests, packages, pages, and pull requests and highlights the interconnected nature of downtime.
Facebook and its subsidiaries, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced outages lasting about 6 hours on October 4, 2021. Although most social media applications were affected, this outage stopped small businesses who use the platform and cut off employees using these platforms for internal collaboration.
Zoom experienced an outage on August 24, 2021, lasting for 3 hours. Zoom has become integral to business communication and educational institutions since the onset of Covid-19, making the effects of this downtime as widespread as the pandemic.
CloudFlare experienced an outage lasting about 2 hours on June 24, 2021, impacting Discord, Feedly, AWS, Crunchyroll, Linode, and other web services. The downtime triggered a 15% drop in traffic across its network and is yet another example of the domino effect of outages.
Akamai Technologies experienced downtime on June 17, 2021. The downtime lasted for about 4 hours and affected websites like Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The intricate nature of the infrastructure behind these massive corporations caused one company’s outage to have a domino effect on every other associated player.
Fastly, one of the world’s largest CDN (Content Delivery Network) companies experienced an hour-long outage on June 8, 2021. This caused website downtime for many sites in a range of industries, like Amazon, eBay, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, and The New York Times.
Salesforce was impacted by an outage on May 11, 2021, lasting just over 5 hours. The damage was so extensive their status page was taken down along with their infrastructure. Salesforce is a popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform relied on by many companies. One lesson here is that decoupling your status page from your primary infrastructure will let others know when you’re up or down, and what you’re doing to fix it.
The world’s largest search engine Google had an outage on April 12, 2021, which was resolved in just under an hour. Unfortunately, Google’s search engine wasn’t the only service impacted – connected products like YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, and Classroom were all hit by downtime.
Microsoft Teams experienced connectivity issues for 3 hours on March 15, 2021, alongside Azure, Microsoft 365, and other related services. The effects of this outage were felt around the world, specifically by businesses and educational institutions relying on Microsoft Teams for internal communication.
AlertOps gives you the power to act proactively and resolve incidents even before they occur. And even if they do, your response is streamlined and efficient so that your customer experience is always seamless.
