Cloud Outages - More than a Flat Tyre

From their timing to frequency to bounce-back windows to eventual impact - outages in cloud environments are becoming serious enough to come on the front-burner of an enterprise's security strategy. Let's watch this pot while it boils.

- Pratima H

It may not happen every day. It can be fixed with a spare wheel in no time. yet, a tyre—which has gone bust—hurts quite bad. Specially when the vehicle is a truck carrying a load for a lot of businesses. More so, when this truck is dashing past a superhighway, where its slight loss of speed can cause big ripples of confusion and delays for other vehicles in that lane.

The truckload of cloud cannot afford these interruptions. And no matter how big or strong you are, an outage is not something any cloud player or customer can afford to take lightly. In the last few months itself, we have seen Oracle, AWS, Google, Microsoft, IT Glue. Datadog and many cloud players suffer some glitch or the other.

From a multi-day outage that IT Glue and OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) went through, to a datacentre fire-led Greyout in Google, to a halt in services for Azure, Teams and AWS at other points—almost every big and small name in this space has confronted this uninvited beast.

As per IsDown’s Cloud Providers Health Report – July 2023, AWS had two major incidents, with a total outage time of 4.3 hours—showing increased propagation delay and elevated error rates. Azure had three incidents with a total outage time of 26.4 hours showing network connectivity issues and logs data access issues. Its September 2023 data shows that AWS had a total of seven incidents with a total outage time of about 26 hours, with route resolver VPC query logs delayed, increased error rates for cluster upgrades and network connectivity issues. Azure had one incident with a total outage time of 14.5 hours.