Top 7 cases of downtime known services and resources in 2013

Despite the fact that information technologies are developing very rapidly, there are still problems. In particular, so far no one has managed to achieve absolute protection against emergency situations. Typhoons, power outages, the human factor - all this leads to equipment downtime and inoperability sites / services. On the most significant problems of 2013 it is worth remembering before the start of the new, 2014, year.

Problems with Visa Services in Canada

')
In the financial sector, the inoperability of service / equipment even in a couple of seconds can lead to significant monetary losses. Especially when it comes to payment processing. So, this year, January 28, all services from Visa stopped working in Canada.

Problems arose due to power outages in the Total System Services Inc. data center. (TSS) is one of the largest payment processing services in North America. The problems affected all Visa cardholders issued by the CIBC, the Royal Bank of Canada and the TD Canada Trust.

BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster Issues

One of the largest hosting providers in the world stopped working on August 2 of this year, when problems arose in the company's data center located in Utah. The problem arose as a result of a hardware failure in the standard server preventive procedure, which resulted in a cascade of equipment failures throughout the data center.

Of course, the sites of the company's clients did not work at that time, and this is many hundreds of thousands of resources and services.

Windows Azure, Xbox Live

Inside the Microsoft data center

Due to the launch of the Xbox One gaming console and the increased load on the company's servers, the “cloud” Windows Azure service began to malfunction. As a result - problems with the work of Xbox Live. During the day, users of the service noted failures both with saving data and with multiplayer in the corresponding games.

And before that, in March, Microsoft had problems with its mail service when both Hotmail and Outlook.com
did not work for 16 hours. Then problems arose as a result of problems with software updates.

Power outage at DreamHost

Another largest hosting provider, DreamHost, was unable to ensure the efficiency of its services as a result of a power outage of the company's data center. It happened on March 20, which resulted in the shutdown of 350 thousand customers for a period of two days.

One can only imagine what losses commercial organizations received as a result of the shutdown of their sites.

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft cloud services were not alone in their hardware and software problems. The same problems arose with Amazon Web Services in August. Then even the Amazon site stopped working for a while.

In September, Friday, the 13th, the problems recurred, then Heroku and Github services were affected, among others.

Despite all these problems, Amazon Web Services has become much better when compared with 2012.

Healthcare.gov

Probably, the problems with this service, which was created as part of one of the main projects on reform of the insurance system in the United States, can be called an “epic file”. The service, which was created based on the attendance of hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) could not begin work in early December.

That one problem, then another, the technical failure, the human factor. As a result, the launch of the service can hardly be called "successful." Rather, this is one of the demonstrations of how not to work.

Yahoo Mail

This month, December, there were problems with Yahoo Mail, and the service experienced problems not for an hour or two, but four days. For a mailer of such a company, this case can be called unprecedented.

Marissa Meyer, the current head of the company, said that there were complex problems with the equipment, and one of the problems was the failure of the data storage system.