Power Outage Takes Down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest

So as many may have already figured out, three of the most popular sites went down on Friday night. This led to chaos and confusion as the “Internets” seemed to have been broken. When thinking about operations management or project management one must automatically assume that their is a contingency plan right? With everything now a days moving to the Cloud and into the abyss that is the internet, how could Amazon one of the conglomerates to hold the throne not have had a back up plan? A wee little storm happened to blow out the power in North Virginia. The outage occurred last night at 11:21 p.m. EST when Amazon’s Compute Cloud in North Virginia went down during violent thunder storm.

 

Seeing that most people cannot live without being connected, I cannot imagine the world we live in not having it. So with everything moving to Cloud Storage and most of the major developers offering free / paid space (Google, Apple, and Microsoft) How can management be so sure that everyone’s data is going to be safe. Even though what happened with these three sites was temporary (Netflix and Pinterest came back later that night, Instragram is still MIA), how stable is the Cloud going to be. The biggest concern would be that all of that data was being ran through one facility, granted that this was probably a freak occurrence, but should Amazon not have had a backup server?  Netflix already in the mist of rebuilding their image after their pricing fiasco was really not in a good position to take yet another blow. I know it probably is not as simple as a back up server, but there has to be other options for these companies if this type of event does occur.  How big of a backlash will this be, not just to Amazons cloud service, but for the three companies involved?

The repercussion of the cloud going down especially on a Friday night can also lead to positive results with other company’s looking to move toward cloud based services. Company’s that run these services, IBM, Oracle, and Akami can see this and offer packages that consist of having a contingency plan is things go array. Lets also not forget the security that these systems and services have to insure with the companies they are dealing with. So to bring this back to project mangement, this just shows that having a contingency plan during whether its in operations or an ad hoc project is a must. Management must know all of the risks they are undertaking before acting on a plan.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57464342-71/modern-life-halted-as-netflix-pinterest-instagram-go-down/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/06/30/amazon-cloud-goes-down-friday-night-taking-netflix-instagram-and-pinterest-with-it/

6 thoughts on “Power Outage Takes Down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest

  1. This post definitely relates to operations management because even when things are going well, it is vital for management to plan for possible problems that may occur. In this case, Amazon failed to prepare for their cloud service going down, and the result of this is many angry customers wondering why they couldn’t access three of the most popular sites on the web. Hopefully Amazon can learn from this so that something like this doesn’t happen in the future.

  2. I thought this post brought up a great example of a real life situation where management did not correctly handle all the eggs in their basket so to speak. Management should always try to have a back up plan for when things go wrong. While I realize this isn’t financially realistic, at the same time, they should always be on the lookout for when things aren’t going to work out the way one thinks it would.

    Another real life instance of this is when LinkedIn was recently hacked and had all their passwords stolen. It turned out that LinkedIn had essentially used software protection programs that weren’t really top notch. As a result, they were taken advantage and suffered a bad loss in public image. Management should always be thinking of potential weaknesses and better ways to fix them.

  3. I have worked in a government office before and one of the major discrepencies they would often have was over whether or not they should move their internet from ethernet cords to wireless and use the cloud. But, obviously major concerns were safety against hackers or things such as the whether causing power outages. It’s an interesting topic, since as they become more mainstream, there’s always more people that learn how to hack into these programs, so what can take place to keep these connections secure when they are much easier to work with?

  4. I think Pinterest and Instragram can get away with this disruption. Both are free services that are fairly new and do not generate great revenue. Users should understand there will be kinks in the system that need to be worked out. Netflix, on the other hand, is a different story. Netflix is a paid-service and had $226 million net income in 2011. Netflix users are much more likely to completely abandon the platform due to this disruption. With some much invested, you would think Netflix would have better contingency plans (seane599 did in this post). A leader or project manager needs to consider the worst case scenario (as we are in our own projects) and plan accordingly.

  5. I agree with Christopher’s comment on the post. A project manager should definitely plan for THE worst case scenario and plan the exit route to a better world. As far as the post is concerned, this is more related to how risk management is handled in a firm and less of a project management.
    But they should have a new project in place: prepare a plan to deal with such external factors.

  6. I agree that companies should always have a contingency plan, especially for technology, which in today’s environment changes and fails frequently. My company heavily relies on one company to host all of the different websites we run for marketing purposes. There are about 350 different websites and this article and post make me wonder how safe we are by having all of our “eggs in one basket.” Do we have a contingency plan? I wonder if my IT department has even considered what we would do if the other company failed, or if its services failed us in some way.

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