Welcome to our ongoing series covering downtime blunders around the world (wide web). We first covered a series of downtime incidents in 2017. And now we're making it a regular occurrence here on the Downtime Prevention Blog at Blue Matador. Until we help rid the world of the evils of service interruptions with our aws monitoring tool, we'll report on some of the more notable or interesting incidents here.
Here's the first 3 incidents for March. Check back next week for the following part in our series.
Bitbucket - March 2, 2018
Atlassian's version control repository hosting service, Bitbucket, went dark for developers on March 2. Atlassian noted "service interruptions" (PR speak for downtime) caused by increased HTTP error rates through their AWS implementation. With issues persisting for over 5 hours, we were among the customers affected, making it personal for us.
With headlines like "Bitbucket kicks the, er, bucket," you know people aren't happy about experiencing downtime. It affects sales, loyalty, and retention as well as your mood.
IKEA - March 3, 2018
Internationally renowned flat-pack furniture company IKEA may be the world's largest consumer of wood, but they're also a huge player in the point-of-sale transactional space, processing some 11 million transactions in 2016 alone.
So when that point of sale system goes down, customers ain't happy. (Kinda gives another definition to the term "POS" system, doesn't it?),
Two of our own employees were affected by Ikea's downtime in their Utah location on March 3. For five and a half hours, IKEA had to essentially shut down the store, turning away customers from buying furniture and housewares. When the systems returned to operational status, lines exploded (as some customers' tempers did as well). It's a hard reminder that downtime doesn't just affect websites or apps.
Fortnite - March 8, 2018
The hit co-op sandbox survival video game by Epic Games has had intermittent server issues since its launch in July 2017. But on March 8, access to the game was "disabled for millions of players"
Checkout Downtime Detector's status page to keep tabs on this highly addictive but seemingly turbulent online game's network status.