
2018: The Year In Downtime
Outages, no matter their cause or scope, shake enterprise confidence in the public cloud.
While no cloud is perfect, and to some degree downtime is inevitable, the larger providers leading the industry should be held to higher standards. That's why our year-end list almost exclusively features events that embarrassed the three dominant hyper-scalers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
While those public cloud giants all saw multiple service disruptions in 2018, some more problematic than others, none of them lasted for excessively prolonged stretches or were so widespread they affected large percentages of customers.
Cloud services will continue to see disruptions, but catastrophic failures seem to be a relic of the industry's early, formative years as providers master the art of uptime.