Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft prove no cloud is too big to fail
March 24, 2013
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Caroline Craig.
Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes — and lots of cloud outages. The week started badly for Google Drive users as the cloud-based service for storing documents, videos, and Google Docs was down for several hours Monday. Users vented on social networks over their frustration, with one user tweeting, "Google Drive now back up like a limp horse struggling to move." Google moved quickly to acknowledge the issue on its Apps Status Dashboard but did not say what caused the problem or how many were affected.
On Wednesday, it was LinkedIn’s turn to roll over and play dead. Users hoping to reach out and connect via the social media network were greeted with a 503 error "Service Unavailable" message. The website suffered intermittent service disruptions throughout the morning, knocked out for about 45 minutes, got back up for 30 minutes, then experienced a second service disruption. To date, there’s been no word from LinkedIn on why the outage occurred…
Last week Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook.com vanished from the cloud, leaving users of the online suite of mail, calendar, and storage services unable to access their accounts. It was 16 hours before service was fully restored. A routine server firmware update gone wrong was the culprit, and Microsoft apologized to users on its Outlook blog…
Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/google-linkedin-and-microsoft-prove-no-cloud-too-big-fail-215006