Internet down? Hey, what's going on with our cloud service?

So, this morning I finish my workout after a workout routine from our fitness newsletter and sit in our kitchen to finish my protein shake. After a few minutes out of boredom, I pick up my phone and open Drudge Report and see this:

Hmm, sounds pretty serious. So I clicked the big red link and then I see this headline on a site called Mediaite:

Many Major Websites Down — Including Amazon, CNN, and NY Times — Due to CDN Outage

The article states:

No, it is not just you. A number of major news and commerce websites are currently inaccessible, showing only users an error page that reads “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” due to an outage at massive CDN provider Fastly. This outage is currently affecting highly trafficked websites such as CNN, Reddit, Amazon, and the New York Times among many others. A number of news outlets negatively affected by the outage include CNN, Reddit, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times. Entertainment and service sites are also down like Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, HBOMax, Hulu, and PayPal.

Fastly is one of a handful of large content delivery network (CDN) providers that have become a key factor in keeping the whole global Internet performing fast and reliably. They’re a bit like electric power substations scattered throughout a city — when a substation goes down, it can take out power for a whole neighborhood. And just like substations are essential for keeping your home warm in winter and air conditioning working in summer, CDNs are critical for companies that do business over the Internet. Which in our soon-to-be post-COVID world means just about every business that’s staying in the black.

Internet down and CDN outages: What’s going on?

CDNs are probably also important to the operations and availability of your own business or organization. And also for your business partners, clients, and customers. Knowing what the status is of CDNs and of other cloud services and providers you use or partner with is essential nowadays when so much of our work, health, and life depends on online apps and services functioning when you need them. And most large online businesses and news organizations benefit from partnering with CDNs, even at the risk of having their website go down with a 503 Service Unavailable error if the CDN itself experiences problems. Because from a purely business perspective, it’s always about measuring risk by doing a basic cost/benefit analysis and the cost of self-hosting multiple worldwide instances of your own organization’s website compared to utilizing the delivery mechanism of the already existing global network of CDN providers is really a no-brainer when you come to think of it.

So when I read about this on the Internet this morning — thank goodness Drudge didn’t go down — (hey, I wonder what CDNs Matt Drudge uses for keeping his site always available) — I immediately opened Fastly’s service status page on my phone and saw this:

That’s pretty impressive actually, they’re providing updates on the issue every couple of minutes, plus it looks good on a phone. Not many CDNs or cloud service providers do that. Usually, it’s just a green, yellow or red icon of some sort in a column of a row of a humungous table showing all the different services they offer.

Anyway, in the light of the importance of this subject for many of us who support IT for businesses that have a significant online presence, I thought it might be helpful to provide our TechGenix readers (that’s you!) with links to the status pages of some of the more commonly used cloud services providers, both those used for general business purposes and also those specifically used for IT purposes. Some of these status pages deal with service availability, while others focus on security, performance, and other issues. I’ve also included a few links to third-party sites you can use to check on the availability of the online services of many popular public cloud service providers.

If our readers know of any other status pages for popular cloud services that I’ve missed, feel free to suggest them by adding a comment to the bottom of this article. Also, if you find any errors in my list or can suggest better alternatives than the links I’ve provided, please add your comment concerning these as well. Thanks again for sharing your expertise with our TechGenix global IT pro community!!