Cloud outages are getting more common these days. Want to know why? Simply put, its climate change, it’s politics and it’s hackers. But stick around a little longer to properly get to grips with things.
In January, Microsoft Azure suffered an outage that stopped millions of people from accessing Outlook and Teams. Another major outage, this one caused by a fire, happened in April, impacting Google Cloud users in Europe, Japan, India, Indonesia, as well as South Carolina. It’s thought these sorts of outages cost businesses around $365,000 for each hour they go on. For businesses using the cloud at the moment, outages are simply part of the territory.
Why Do Cloud Outages Happen?
Cloud services rely on centralised management and data centres, so if anything goes wrong with them, millions of users lose access to the cloud. These are physical places of course, so all sorts of things can go wrong. A natural disaster affecting a data centre for example, is a growing danger as the effects of the climate crisis intensify. Last summer, both Google and Oracle data centres shut down in the heatwaves.
There is a tendency to think of the cloud far too literally, as if it floats angelically separate from the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The smooth running of the cloud depends on the smooth running of the real world.
Outages can also occur when bugs or hackers attack the technology. With every development in cybersecurity, hackers get cleverer too. Cloud security is a massive issue, as not only do attacks cause outages which are costly and inconvenient, but they put millions of users’ data at risk.
There are also instances where a cloud is effectively censored by a region. For example China’s Great Firewall that banned Google Drive from the country. Or submarine internet cables might be tampered with, affecting access to the cloud. This happened in France and was thought to be a Russian sabotage. Of course, these underwater cables can be damaged for less sinister reasons, which just goes to show how vulnerable the cloud really is.
Summary
So there you have it. If it’s a heatwave, a hacker, damage to a submarine cable or just plain old censorship, there are plenty of ways that you could lose access to the cloud. A lot of them, unfortunately, are near impossible to avoid. We’ll have to stay tuned with what measure cloud providers put in place to manage these challenges. Do you think we’ll ever be able to stop cloud outages?
