The biggest outages of 2021 had one thing in common: they affected major infrastructure or services providers and, as a result, affected large numbers of enterprises and end users. The lesson? Companies need to be careful about putting all their infrastructure eggs in one basket, or, if they must, to prepare for downtime if that particular service goes down.
“There needs to be a plan in place,” says Angelique Medina, head of product marketing at ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. “Organizations don’t need to be at the mercy of the availability of any one particular service.”
Two of last year’s biggest outages included cloud providers AWS and Azure. Two involved Internet service providers Verizon and Azure. Four outages involved CDN and DNS providers Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly. And rounding out ThousandEyes’ list of the top 10 outages of 2021 are two Facebook outages.
The Facebook outages didn’t just take down the social media network and other company services like Instagram and WhatsApp. Many enterprises use Facebook to authenticate users. When that service went down, users were no longer able to log into those enterprises’ websites.
“Authentication, like DNS, is often overlooked when people think about availability,” Medina tells Network World.
