Like many technological advancements, managed cloud services have quite a history. While the cloud is revolutionary in many aspects, security leaves a lot to be desired. As proof, we’ve seen numerous cloud computing failures over the years.
Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and we must gather more data on security. However, as these stories prove, migrating your business to the cloud is worth the risk. With each breach came more robust security features. If you want to learn more about the most iconic cloud computing failures, you’re in the right place.
The 2012 Netflix Fiasco
On Christmas Eve in 2012, there was a failure in one of Netflix’s cloud solutions. Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Load Balancing service went down, and Netflix went dark as a result.
As you can imagine, that resulted in tons of angry customers who wanted to stream Christmas movies. At the time, it was Netflix’s biggest mishap yet. The platform had further trouble with AWS in 2014 when several of its nodes failed to reboot.
The 2014 Microsoft Azure Outage
Everything seemed normal on November 18, 2014. But Microsoft Azure would get hammered with a massive outage due to a glitch with software updates. They suffered a similar outage the following December in 2015.
Salesforce’s Over-24-Hour Shutdown
In May of 2016, the NA14-hosted version of Salesforce suffered an outage. It would last over 24 hours, resulting in irreversible business damage. Customers also lost countless hours of data during the shutdown. After this fiasco, Salesforce would switch to AWS for its cloud-based services.
DDoS Attacks on Dyn
On October 21, 2016, Dyn DNS got hit with DDoS attacks. The attackers were able to hit dozens of the company’s websites. These included:
- Airbnb
- Ancestry.com
- Netflix
- PayPal
This was a highly reported incident that opened the eyes of many to the reality of cloud and IoT attacks.
Office 365 Has Some Problems
On June 30 of 2016, thousands of Office 365 clients had their email addresses go offline. The outage would last more than 12 hours. Sadly, this wasn’t an isolated incident. Office 365 users would experience similar issues during 2015 and later in 2016.
As you can see, cloud computing technology is a long way from being foolproof. Still, there have been many security improvements in the years since these iconic cloud computing failures. It’s clear that cloud technology is effective, but you should use it with caution.
Categories: Geeks and Nerds Stuff
