Top 5 Cloud Blackout Blunders

The big fluffy white hard-drives in the sky are said to be the future of software-but are they as sometimes as unpredictable as naughty-little-brother-like cumulonimbus clouds? The heavenly body of cloud computing has flexed its muscles prematurely as there have been a long string of major outages:

Blackout Blunder Number 1: Google’s Gmail Gaffe

Google let Gmail fail… for a time. In fact some 150,000 Gmail users logged in to their precious account only to see a blank slate. Considering Gmail is one of the cloud’s great attempts to throttle Microsoft’s stranglehold on Exchange-based enterprise email services, this was a big hit to the cloud. Thankfully Google was able to revert beyond its failed multi-layered backup strategy and reach back to archaic backup tapes-yup tapes.

Blackout Blunder Number 2: Hotmail’s Hot-Water Howler

Hotmail, Microsoft’s own little baby got themselves in some hot water indeed when at the end of 2010 they experienced database errors from a run-amok script that resulted in tens of thousands of inboxes being nothing more than empty shells.

Blackout Blunder Number 3: The Salesforce Snafu

Oh snap-Salesforce slipped up. It was very short but Salesforce’s hour-long outage still outraged tens of thousands of businesses. This blow to cloud computing came early and unfortunately came from one of the first cloud computing giants.

Blackout Blunder Number 4: Amazon’s Apparition

In April Amazon’s Web Service’s customers were left in the dark when their Northern Viginia data center went kaput after a re-mirroring storm. While many of their customer’s weathered the storm via redundancies set up previously-like Netflix-others suffered greatly during the four day blackout.

Blackout Blunder Number 5: Sidekick’s Stumble

In the fall of 2009 T-Mobile’s Sidekick screwup left Sidekick users in a week-long service blackhole-only to later add insult to injury by losing many users’ personal information stored on the units as they forgot to back it up. Whoops.