As websites crash, will doubts cripple cloud investments?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Questions over the cloud loom large as, as many as 12 websites of major companies such as Netflix, Uber and BBC crashed simultaneously early today.

All the websites are hosted by some of the largest cloud services providers (CSPs) globally.

As per media reports, although the websites went down simultaneously in some areas of the US, the CSPs were able to restore them in most cases.

While the respective IT organizations are burning the mid-night-early morning oil to trace the cause of the crash, it is alleged that the cause is connected to trouble at a cloud service relied on by companies.

Internet trouble tracker CurrentlyDown.com displayed a list of two dozen websites that were or had been out of service on Thursday.

The list also included Ameritrade, an online broker and The Economist, according a report by AFP.

Meanwhile, the companies took to social media to pour their outburst.

“We're aware that members are experiencing issues streaming on all devices," streaming television service Netflix said in a tweet at its customer service Twitter account. "We're working to resolve the problem."

Netflix spokesman Joris Evers told AFP that the outage was the result of technical issues at an UltraDNS cloud service provided by Neustar and affected mostly US subscribers.

"UltraDNS is working to address the issue," Evers said. "We apologize for the inconvenience."

Neustar confirmed in a tweet that there was an issue with its UltraDNS.

It was unclear whether all those affected relied on UltraDNS, but ride-sharing service Uber blamed its problems on that.

The UltraDNS service was hit by an outage affecting customers in the eastern United States late afternoon local time, according to Neustar spokeswoman Lara Wyss.

"We can confirm this is not a DDoS attack," Wyss told AFP, referring to a style of cyber attack in which websites are intentionally overloaded with requests for service and crash under the stress.

The incident once again brings to light concerns raised by the CXOs about data security in cloud. And this is not the first outage. Recently Amazon and Google reported crashes of a larger magnitude in the US.

CIOL believes that while cloud is not doubt the technology for organizations going the Opex way, the CSPs will have to work doubly hard to curb such outages. After all, cloud investments are at stake.

God forbid, it be the handiwork or a cybercriminal!!!