Check out what the biggest service interruptions of 2014 were, and how even the largest technology corporations aren't able to achieve perfect uptime and how they overcome the 100% uptime myth.

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The 6 Worst Service
Outages of 2014

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Diving Into Downtime
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Downtime costs…
$5,600/minute
$140,000/incident
- Gartner
Downtime is becoming an increasingly expensive
consequence of the on-demand service culture…

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Consumers have become dependent
on mobile and cloud to the point that
they expect 24/7, 100 percent uptime
…and it can also have a damaging effect on a company’s reputation,
which effects the bottom line even worse than the initial damage

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Of course, 100 percent
uptime isn’t possible…
Sometimes, customers will be left checking their watches waiting for
service restoration, as these six major companies found out last year

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Google 1
The “Great Google Outage of 2014”
lasted less than one hour and affected
10 percent of users. But try telling that
to outraged users of Google’s Gmail,
Calendar and Documents services.
Even Yahoo couldn’t help but point out
the outage on Twitter. Google later
apologized, blaming an internal
software bug for the snafu.

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Microsoft
2
At least Google’s Gmail failure happened on a
Friday. Microsoft wasn’t as lucky last June, when its
Exchange email service suffered nine hours of
downtime in the middle of a busy Tuesday workday.
Users complained about the outage itself, as well as
Microsoft’s slow acknowledgement of the problem.
While Microsoft did not confirm how many users
were impacted, it did reveal the cause of the
outage – “degraded” network infrastructure.

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Evernote
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3
After a distributed denial of service
(DDoS) attack in June, Evernote users
were unable to synchronize their files
across devices. After about 10 hours,
Evernote announced it had restored
service, but that there could still be
“a hiccup or two” in the near future.

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Adobe
4
More than 1 million
subscribers to Adobe’s
Creative Cloud service
were locked out of their
accounts for 28 hours in
May, following a failure
related to “database
maintenance activity.”
Because of the outage,
one prominent UK
newspaper couldn’t
publish its digital edition.

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Dropbox 5
When Dropbox suffered a three-day
outage in January, many frustrated
users left comments on a company
discussion board saying that poor
communication and slow response time
encouraged them to cancel their
subscriptions or consider alternative
cloud storage services. That outage was
the result of a “subtle bug” in software
script, proving that even the smallest
problem could trigger massive
downtime and potential corporate risks.

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Yahoo
6
A severed underwater sea cable led to a whopping
11-day email outage for Yahoo Mail users in the UK
and the U.S. East Coast in December. The
interruption seemed completely outside of Yahoo’s
control – how could the company possibly expect
an underwater cable to be cut? – but one that it
nevertheless paid for in the form of public outrage,
scrutiny and embarrassment.

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Is your network built to bounce back quickly from downtime?
As these examples show, downtime can happen to any
company, of any size, and the reputational consequences
can be significant no matter how sterling your track record

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Meeting Uptime Expectations
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You’ll learn:
• The origin of the 100 percent uptime myth
• Ways to agree on achievable SLAs
• How much outages of major brands really cost
• How "Always-On" media companies such as Sky
Media, King Ltd (makers of Candy Crush), ensure their
network uptime
Download Our eBook
[eBook] Downtime is Irrelevant:
Navigating the 100% Uptime Myth

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Brought to you by…
We’re Opsview, an IT monitoring company that’s helping take IT monitoring tools to the next level. We work with
service providers around the world to deliver enterprise-grade IT monitoring that offers greater oversight of their IT
environments and limits the risks of downtime. Our highly configurable platform empowers you with everything you
need to keep an eye on thousands of devices, from a multi-tenant architecture, to clean and detailed reports, to
seamless integrations with the rest of your IT tools. We believe that to keep your customers connected around the
clock, you need a IT infrastructure that is agile and automated. Opsview is here to help.
http://www.opsview.com/
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Sources:
1. “The Cost of Downtime” Gartner, July 14, 2014
2. “Google Responds to Massive Gmail Outage” Mashable, January 24, 2014
3. “Microsoft fixes Exchange Online outage after almost 9 hours” InfoWorld, June 25, 2014
4. “Feedly and Evernote struck by denial of service cyber-attacks” BBC, June 11, 2014
5. “Adobe Creative Cloud crash shows that no cloud is too big to fail” InfoWorld, May 16, 2014
6. “After Dropbox Outage, Users Are Calling in Cloud Storage Competitors” VentureBeat, January 13, 2014
7. “Yahoo Mail’s 11-day Outage is Not Inspiring Confidence in Users” Quartz, December 3, 2014