The rash of outages kicked off on Saturday the 17th at about 4:47PM (Pacific Time) with Google Apps disappearing from the internet. Although the entire outage did not last more than about 5 minutes the effects were pretty staggering. At the height of the incident worldwide internet traffic dropped by an estimated 40%. Yes you read that right almost half of the global internet traffic was affected by a five minute outage at Google. This number seems pretty large (and it is) however, we have a feeling that the majority of that traffic was spam heading to Gmail. Many companies that rely on Google were at a standstill for the unusual outage with many companies at a loss for what to do or even who to report it to. I know that I have already been contacted about contingency plans for cloud service outages as a result of this brief, unplanned down time for Google.

Now, while Google’s outage was shocking and left many stunned and confused; Amazon’s outage appeared to be more “business as usual” even though it was highly annoying to many Amazon users. Here the outage was just the latest in a string of them over the last 12 months. Amazon’s hiccup lasted a little longer than Google’s with the total outage time around one hour (11:50 am to 12:44PM PST). During the time of the outage the Amazon Web Services was unavailable and even Amazon’s own site was offline (trace routes dropped off en-route to their datacenter). Twitter was abuzz with comments and complaints about the problem, but nothing ever showed up on the AWS dashboard. There was no attempt to identify what percentage of internet traffic the Amazon outage impacted which is interesting considering how many were eager to see how much of an impact Google had. Our guess it that Amazon has these issues far too often to be really big news anymore.

Internet and service outages are nothing new and will continue, but when you look at the impact they can have (as in the case of Google’s outage) it is not hard to see just what a target companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are. We are not talking about from the average hacker or even Anonymous; we are talking about the much larger concern of state sponsored attacks. How many companies would be dead in the water if they could no longer reach Google, Amazon, Microsoft or any number of cloud services? Sure a 5 minute outage out of an entire year is very small (about 0.00095%), but it shows that even Google’s services are not invulnerable.  As for Amazon, well there are still a large number of companies that rely on their services that continue to be impacted by their frequent outages, but many of these do not have the resources to bring all of their systems back in house without an even larger impact to their business. It makes me wonder just what these businesses were told to get them to sign up in the first place…

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