Major outage hits Microsoft Office 365
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Maybe it's just accidental downtime. But Microsoft is not exactly competitive in the cloud computing world (unless you need to run Windows apps) - I don't think it's in their interests for this movement to succeed in the business world.
I have to agree with you on that, but I don't think they would go that far to tarnish the image of other cloud providers.
Right now, just about every other cloud service can offer better uptime numbers than Microsoft.
I'm not exaggerating. This is really what small business IT looks like.
If you have the money to do at least 2 geographically separate datacenters properly, secure them with guards, cameras, and biometric or at least electronic access controls, get redundant backbone connections from different Tier 1 providers, and you have enough talent to develop appropriate processes/procedures as well as properly identify and hire other talented people, and you can pay them enough to keep them happy and your equipment modern and functioning, then congratulations, host your own. But if you meet these criteria, you are more likely to be a competitor to Google than a consumer.
/rant. Sorry. All this talk about how the cloud is too risky for businesses drives me up the wall. I understand that it feels good to be responsible for your own failures, but when you are a business, it is not about what feels good, it's about what works.
Friendly reminder indeed.
Given that the person I replied to has recently made several short posts containing obvious and often unsupported Google advocacy, I also found his posts dubiously motivated. I'd prefer not to get into some extensive meta-discussion here, I just don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour, and apparently neither do several other people who have since upvoted my original comment. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to posting more constructive things instead...
And you're the only one down voting my stuff..
If you'd like to give a rigorous definition of that "uptime" figure, I imagine we could work out the probability of my experience on all those different occasions, working with several different groups in several different places, happening by chance despite the true uptime figure still being 99.984%.
Right now, it fails the credibility test. That uptime gives you about an hour and a half of downtime per year on average. I don't think we managed a single meeting in the past year without someone in the room having trouble using the software in one way or another.
> And you're the only one down voting my stuff..
I didn't downvote you, I replied to you.
You must have another very serious problem. This doesn't look like any past experience I heard of. I have been relying heavily on Google applications since 2005 and, in those years, had only one minor glitch when setting up my wife's company corporate mail - an account I couldn't create for some time.
That is possible, of course. However, I would point out that these meetings were attended by a whole team of contractors, each with their own computers configured with their own choice of OS and browser. Moreover, they were held in a variety of different locations, and indeed across several different locations at once via teleconference on some occasions. In other words, it wasn't one very serious problem, it was probably a whole bunch of little problems that caused specific features to be inaccessible to certain locations or not to work properly on specific client platforms during a particular period. (Before anyone jumps in, clearly everyone's Internet connections were fine during the teleconferences, because we were using Internet-based conference software to run them...)
My point is only that it's a bit rich to claim a 99.984% uptime based, presumably, on having servers available, if the code that is running on those servers isn't properly quality controlled so that customers can actually use it to do real work. Just because most of the people on the team can connect fine, it still screws up the meeting if a few others can't follow along. Just because people looking at the spreadsheet in Firefox and Chrome can update it, it doesn't help if the guys using IE can't see the changes.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google. I don't particularly like or dislike them either - I use their services and I am more or less happy with them. It's only fair to say I don't like Microsoft that much either - I have been a Windows user and developer for a good part of my career and I know how bad their software really is. Their business practices are also plain disgusting.
That is reason 37signals kicks ass: today some users had issues updating posts (I was not affected) but they said that on the status page.
Cloud service are important for some companies. Not an "ad clicking playground".
Apologize for being sarcastic and angry: I just hit me in nerves when I see somebody saying how Google Apps are great when they are not and my business suffered a lot because of their "prima donna" behavior.
Complex systems like Office 365 or Google Apps very rarely go down completely. Let's say you have a million users using the system for one hour. One of them can't get access to anything in the system. In this hour, you can consider the system had an uptime of 99.9999%.
It's often more complicated, as the users can get access to parts of the system while others show missing or outdated information or some functionality doesn't work.
I too get frustrated by Google's attitude sometimes, but let's face it: they serve a lot of people. It wouldn't be practical to offer human assistance and, if they did, you'd end up waiting for hours until you got to a knowledgeable human being.