10 Application Failures of 2014 That Expose Importance of Monitoring

By Chris Preimesberger

The cloud-based file-sharing company had a great first 10 days of 2014. Then a global outage happened on Jan. 10. The culprit? A hard-to-catch bug in the script used in an operating system upgrade.

When system maintenance needs maintenance of its own, you know there’s an issue. For more than a full day, the design world was banging their heads against their keyboards, unable to access Web versions of applications like Photoshop and InDesign.

Think an hour isn’t that much time for an application failure? You must not have needed Gmail in January when less than an hour of downtime led to panic of global proportions.

Things you might need to access on a Tuesday probably include your email. But for some, that just wasn’t an option when Microsoft Exchange experienced an outage due to a code issue that lasted the bulk of the day.

Facebook’s most recent outage in September had users in several countries hitting refresh on their browsers to no avail. Twenty minutes later, the problem was solved, but some of the damage was already done; hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage for the company. Facebook pointed to an infrastructure change as the cause of the outage.

On Sept. 9, eager Apple users tuned in for the company’s latest product announcement. Disappointment ensued when they were greeted by a poor or nonexistent connection and the persistent background noise of a foreign language as Tim Cook spoke.

If there was ever a bad time for “routine maintenance,” the first Sunday game of the NFL season was definitely it. Fans went wild not over the on-screen action between the Colts and Broncos, but because of the inability to check on their fantasy teams.

For about seven hours this September, there wasn’t an app for … anything. App store visitors looking to download anything on this day were met with a message saying their selection was no longer available.

Instead of getting right to work monitoring their newly acquired messaging company, Facebook was left with hundreds of millions of users who couldn’t access the service and were forced to return to their old ways of paying fees for sending messages internationally.

For two days this summer, accessing online billing details wasn’t an option for some Verizon customers. New subscribers also had issues activating their phones. The #VerizonFail hashtag (and frustrations that came with it) could have been avoided with monitoring.