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Microsoft and Google hit by cloud down time

Mat Bettinson

by Mat Bettinson
Monday, September 12th 2011 at 12:09AM

Microsoft and Google hit by cloud down time

Cloud based services from Microsoft and Google have both suffered outages over the last few days, calling into question the reliability of cloud computing.

Google's online office suite, Google Docs suffered some down time late last week as the service became inaccessible, displaying 'waiting' messages for users. Google Documents, Google Docs List and Google Drawings were affected.

Google released an incident report pointed to a "configuration update" the internet giant had pushed out which placed a heavy load on an internal system. Google's engineering team detailed a raft of causes and planned fixes including increasing memory capacity and deploying extra servers.

The next day Microsoft began to suffer a range of outages across cloud-based services including Office 365 and Windows Live services including Hotmail and SkyDrive.

"Preliminary root cause suggests a DNS issue, though we're still working hard to restore," Microsoft tweeted. A fix to the DNS problems would take some hours to restore as DNS records updated around the world.

Ken Moody data centre services manager at the Cloud Computing Centre services manager Ken Moody told BBC News that the down time meant "there will be an element of confidence shaken."

Moody asserted that firms should look to cloud solutions with smaller data centres  where risk could be "divided up where resilience could be guaranteed," he said.

Since the Cloud Computing Centre is in the business of hosting cloud solutions this is exactly what you'd expect them to say.

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Tags: Microsoft, Google, cloud computing

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