The silence is deafening. You run from device to device, trying desperately to reach someone—anyone. No matter how hard you try, you can’t connect to the applications you need. You can’t even file a complaint. They’re simply not there. They’ve...disappeared.
You suddenly remember that your McSocial app will listen to all your complaints. You open the application, ready to encapsulate your displeasure in 280 angry characters, but it won’t load. What’s going on?
Is this a widespread outage? ISP, cloud provider, or DNS-related? You don’t know. And without Network Intelligence, you’re in the dark...and you can’t find a way out.
But you may not be alone, because on the other end of that invisible wire stretching across the Internet is a team that may be scrambling to understand why their users can’t get to them. Yes, be angry, but have pity too. You may not control how the Internet whacks your apps, but app providers don’t either.
So. Many. Outages.
Nobody escaped the onslaught of outages this year. Comcast, Route 53, AWS, GitHub, DE-CIX—one by one, these outages reduced the number of services available to users, till in the end, no one was unaffected.
- Comcast claimed the most victims, with its fiber-cut outage cutting off or slowing down service for millions of Internet users—even beyond its customer base.
- AWS had multiple service outages, one involving the hijacking of its DNS service, Route 53, another due to a power outage in Ashburn, and yet another due to an ISP problem power outage that impacted AWS US-east-2.
- A DE-CIX switch in Frankfurt took down a large portion of the Internet for a major world economy.
- GitHub weathered a massive DDoS attack that not only disrupted its service, but also caused collateral damage to other services.
- Many other services, such as Amazon, Slack, Twitter, Facebook went dark at some point, due to a network or application issue.
These outages can occur without warning—and no one is safe. To survive an outage and restore service, enterprise and SaaS providers need visibility that spans multiple layers, so they can quickly determine if the problem is with the application or the network. And if it's the network, whose network is at fault. Don’t let an outage take you out. Sign up for a free trial today to get visibility into your availability and performance across the global Internet.