Recent Cloud Outages Rain on Small-Biz Productivity

Last Wednesday the Google Docs cloud-based office productivity suite went offline for about an hour or so, and then on Thursday night the Microsoft cloud went down as well. The latter included Hotmail, SkyDrive, MSN, Azure, and Office 365. These were significant outages, although both Google and Microsoft were quick to respond and fix the problems.

This might not seem like such a big deal, but it brings up the question of the reliability of the cloud, especially as Microsoft suffered a more serious outage just last month. Last month also saw outages with Amazon and SingTel, a Sinagapore-based telco.

In fact, cloud service outages are now so commonplace that there is a website where users can go to track them. If you hadn’t heard of it yet, you might hear about downrightnow.com a whole lot more in the future. The site has been doing a good job of watching the major cloud-computing services for outages.

Lst week InfoWorld even noted that Microsoft wasn't the first to report its own outage. -- rather, downrightnow.com was the first to report it.

According to the InfoWorld story: “Remarkably, downrightnow reported the outage at 7:18 p.m., more than an hour before Microsoft even hinted there was a problem."

The site downrightnow actually tracks top services and companies including Facebook, Foursquare, Google Mail, Tumblr, Twitter, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and YouTube, while also watching Blogger, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Netflix, Ning, PayPal, Skype, and TypePad.

Heavy cloud users are certainly beginning to bookmark this site and watch it as closely as one might watch the stock market ticker. Is this just a sign of how reliant we have become in regards to our online based services, or just that we expect failure? This seems like a throwback to the days of rural cable, where people would just expect to experience regular outages.

That might seem like an oxymoron – regular outages – because nothing should be regular about not having service, and this is a major dark cloud for the future of cloud computing. The very concept of the cloud is that it is meant to be accessible anytime, anywhere, and not just “when there aren’t outages.”

The truth is that a few outages are nothing more than hiccups. It is actually far more like the cable going out during extreme inclement weather than the old days of only semi-reliable cable TV. That technology has come a long way and is so reliable that outages are a rare thing.

But to see an increase in outages with the cloud is surprising, and the fact that there is a site that is tracking these outages questions the very reliability of the nature of the cloud. Last month FierceCEO.com in its TechWatch column summed up the issue concisely in a post titled, “Cloud users feeling helpless amid outages.”

And this is the rub. The cloud is a great thing that can connect distant offices, offer reliable backup and -- in theory at least -- be available anywhere, anytime. But these outages, even when they're temporary, make one thing clear: When the cloud is down, productivity screeches to a halt.

If the problem means you can't send email or work on a document for a few minutes, then you can usually do something else for a while. But imagine a "dumb" network computer -- like the Google ChromeBook -- that relies on the cloud to do almost everything? Can you even play solitaire while waiting for the problem to be resolved?

In the end we can consider this part of the learning curve and assume that it will get better. Cable TV after all has gotten better (yeah, it costs a lot more too, but we get so much more), but there is another issue. As I’ve noted in the past, Internet traffic will only continue to increase.

So the question here is whether outages could be more common as the cloud gets more crowded? It makes that hard drive on the desk seem like not such a bad thing after all.