# Top 5 Cloud Blackout Blunders

> Markdown version of https://brajeshwar.com/2011/top-10-cloud-blackout-blunders/ — 2011-07-02

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 <a href="http://www.gmail.com/">Gmail</a> 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

<a href="http://www.hotmail.com/">Hotmail</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.salesforce.com/">Salesforce</a> 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 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/">Amazon's Web Service's</a> 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 <a href="http://sidekick.t-mobile.com/">Sidekick</a> 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.