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What Is Cloud Computing? Definition, Benefits, Types, and Trends
Cloud computing refers to the use of hosted services, such as data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software over the internet. The ...
notable cloud outages
2020 and 2021 have been marked by several <anchor>notable cloud outages</anchor>, affecting some of the largest providers in the world. In March 2020, some of Azure’s North American customers faced a six-hour outage due to cooling system failure. Google’s cloud services were down several times last year, and, most recently in April, Microsoft faced another outage, affecting both Microsoft 365 and Azure. In 2021, companies will invest in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, along with cloud-agnostic platforms, to ensure greater IT resiliency.
5 Cloud Outages That Shook the World in 2020 - Spiceworks
# 5 Cloud Outages That Shook the World in 2020

Here are the top five cloud outages that impacted businesses and uptime goals.

December 29, 2020

Though 2020 was the year of cloud computing, it also witnessed major cloud outages, which impacted businesses and uptime goals on a massive level. Toolbox shares the top five cloud outages that knocked out large portions of internet services this year.

Cloud computing removed the frustration of large-scale IT infrastructure investments and brought a wave of new benefits. In fact, the cloud is expected to make 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020. Organizations that made steady investments in the cloud weathered the crisis better than those that didn’t. But the crisis also proved to be a stress test for mega cloud computing platforms, which withstood an explosion of work from home, a sudden surge in remote traffic and major disruptions.

2020 witnessed major cloud outages that had a cascading impact on web services, apps, and overall business. This gave a clear message to cloud vendors and enterprises that even though the cloud is powerful, it is not foolproof. Frequent interruptions and downtime show organizations should rework their disaster recovery plan.

Here are the top cloud outages of 2020.

### Microsoft Azure, March 2020

On March 3, 2020, Microsoft Azure services in Microsoft’s East U.S. data center region encountered more than six hours of outage. The outage affected a subset of East U.S. customers. The Redmond giant disclosed that a cooling system failure led to the outage, which impacted storage, compute, networking, and other services. According to the root cause analysis reportOpens a new window, the malfunction was fixed by manually resetting the cooling system’s controllers. The company informed that it was reviewing the building automation control system and mechanical cooling system responsible for the incident.

### IBM Cloud, June 2020

IBM Cloud suffered a multi-zone, four-hour interruption of services on June 10, 2020 that affected IBM cloud customers in Washington, D.C., Dallas, London, Frankfurt, and Sydney. The outage impacted general cloud services, Kubernetes services, App connect, and Watson AI cloud services. An investigation revealed that a third party network provider flooded the IBM Cloud network with incorrect routing, which impacted IBM Cloud services and 80+ data centers.

Another IBM cloud outage was reported on June 25, 2020, which lasted for three hours.

### Cloudflare, July 2020

A 27 minutes Cloudflare outage took down a significant chunk of internet services on July 17, 2020. The outage was due to a configuration error in Cloudflare’s global backbone network, which resulted in a 50% traffic drop across its network. The disruption impacted several big name clients such as Discord, Feedly, GitLab, League of Legends, Patreon, Politico, and Shopify. John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare, saidOpens a new window, “We’ve already made changes to the backbone configuration to make sure that this cannot happen again.”

### AWS, November 2020

Even though 2020 turned out to be a strong financial year for AWS, the cloud giant suffered a multi-hour, global outage on November 25, 2020 which sparked a wave of memes on Twitter. The interruption affected the U.S. East-1 region that knocked down services of prominent AWS customers, including 1Password, Adobe Spark, Autodesk, Flickr, iRobot, Roku, Twilio, The Washington Post, and Glassdoor. The interruption was triggered due to the small addition of capacity to Amazon KinesisOpens a new window. Also, it affected other AWS services, such as Lambda, LEX, Macie, Managed Blockchain, Marketplace, MediaLive, MediaConvert, Personalize, Rekognition, SageMaker, and Workspaces.

### Google Cloud, December 2020

On December 14, 2020, Google Cloud experienced a widespread outage that interrupted services, including YouTube, Google Workspace, and Gmail. The 47 minutes outage was due to its automated storage quota management system that reduced the authentication system’s capacity and prevented users from accessing the services.

The company wroteOpens a new window, “At 04:08 am the root cause and a potential fix were identified, which led to disabling the quota enforcement in one datacenter at 04:22 am. This quickly improved the situation, and at 04:27 am the same mitigation was applied to all datacenters, which returned error rates to normal levels by 04:33 am.”

Undeniably, the cloud underpins technologies for smooth business operations. But prolonged cloud outages hamstring internet services and severely impact customer service and business revenues. Organizations need to prepare for sudden disruptions with a strong recovery plan and enhance their dependence on a hybrid cloud strategy. This boils down to one question — should enterprises migrate their mission-critical applications to the public cloud?

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Priya Jha

Priya Jha works as an Assitant Editor for Toolbox. She focuses on the latest trends and innovations in the B2B industry. With an education background in engineering, she skillfully employs her knowledge in developing stories on cloud, data, security, and emerging technologies. You can reach her at priya_jha@www.spiceworks.com.

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