Major Outages in Just Months: Facebook, Instagram, and AWS

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Over the past few months, major companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon Web Services have suffered major outages that left many users without service. Many of these major companies use cloud services so this outage has raised awareness for the risk of using cloud computing technology.

The first major outage occurred on February 28th when Facebook went down for about 30 minutes. This outage was one of the biggest black eyes in the company’s history because approximately 1/3 of its user base were impacted by this failure. Since then, Facebook has increased their efforts to design apps that are more resilient to failure by building “redundancy into our software architecture.” This change includes things like running data generators within virtual machines that are built to make sure that these major changes are protected against future outages.

Before the Facebook outage, Instagram experienced a major outage on January 26th where users were unable to access their feed, log into their accounts, upload photos, or delete photos for about 4 hours. This outage was caused by a major release that went bad and affected its Application Program Interface. The company has since released several updates over the past few months including an update that worked to fix major issues with its Android app release in April.

The most recent major outage occurred on April 21st when Amazon’s major cloud services went down for about 5-30 minutes depending on a particular issue which resulted in downtime for popular websites like Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, and Heroku.

It’s important to note that outages can happen for a variety of reasons such as hardware failures, software errors, natural disasters, and more. This means that it’s important for companies to have a back up plan in place for when these outages occur.

One way to help prevent outages is by using information technology services that can help you manage your risk and improve your resiliency.

At TrinWare, they provide their clients with a suite of Managed IT Services that helps them prepare for and respond to major outages.

Some of the services they offer include:

  • 24/7 monitoring of your systems so that they can be alerted immediately if an outage occurs
  • Expert support for major outages so that they can help you get back up and running as quickly as possible
  • Proactive maintenance and updates to your systems to help prevent outages from happening in the first place

If you’re interested in learning more about how TrinWare can help you prepare for and respond to major outages, please contact them at trinware.com or call at (720) 488-9800. They would be happy to discuss their services with you and answer any questions you may have.