MSN Hotmail Down

[chksix]

Outage hits Hotmail and MSN.com (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/technology-news/outage-hits-hotmail-and-msncom-20110909-1k1e1.html)

Not good :ugh:

[ericlday]

Appears to be ok now.

[green granite]

fine here too

[chksix]

Yep, they got it up really quick. :ok:

[SpringHeeledJack]

Are these outages more likely now as cloud computing becomes more prevalent online, in that with various services grouped together the chances of a problem in one having more scope to affect the others ?



SHJ

[Mike-Bracknell]

Are these outages more likely now as cloud computing becomes more prevalent online, in that with various services grouped together the chances of a problem in one having more scope to affect the others ?



SHJ

The outages are more likely, but not for that reason (in fact that would have a negligible effect on the probability). Much more likely is the increasing popularity of the service brings more diverse means with which to connect, and more nefarious people trying to affect service. Both of which will have a negative impact on uptimes.

The #1 shout of a sysadmin is "if it weren't for users, my systems would be bulletproof".

[mixture]

chksix,

"Not Good" in what sense ?

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for in this life.

If you want someone to shout at down the phone when things go wrong, or an SLA to "guarantee" uptime, then you have to pay for it.

Don't expect Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc. to always be up. They won't. They're providing a free service and you should be grateful they maintain the levels of uptime they do at their own expense.

[mixture]

SHJ,

Are these outages more likely now as cloud computing becomes more prevalent online, in that with various services grouped together the chances of a problem in one having more scope to affect the others ?


Depends if you put all your eggs in one basket. If you decide to buy into the magical cloud (which is essentially marketing fluff around the old-fashioned shared server hosting model), and you put all your data on one cloud provider's infrastructure, then you get what you deserve when they have their outages. If you're going to host on cloud, you should develop your application defensively and store data on multiple clouds.

Again, "pay peanuts, get monkeys"..... despite the marketing claims, you should not expect cloud providers to provide high levels of uptime. Its a heavily virtualised environment, often powered by bleeding edge software hacked together internally.