Uptime.com Shares Critical Website Monitoring Lessons From 2021’s Biggest Internet Outages

Downtime monitoring is vital to protecting a business’ online infrastructure as the occurrence of cyber threats grows.

A recent study by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that the growing rates of automation and technology adoption are translating to increased productivity in the United States. In the third quarter of 2020 alone, productivity rose 4.6 percent, following a 10.6 percent increase in the second quarter.

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This was the largest six-month improvement in productivity since 1965. However, the increasing usage of, and dependency on, technology can also result in businesses becoming more vulnerable to cyber threats.

Uptime.com, an industry-leading website uptime monitoring and performance solution, has aggregated data on 2021’s biggest internet outages — a growing problem for the e-commerce industry in the wake of rising cyber crime cases. The longest-lasting outage in 2021 occurred on December 7th, when Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down for 6.5 hours. This downtime event not only caused Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations to stop, but it also impacted many popular websites either owned or affiliated with the company. These impacted websites and applications included Twitch.tv, Whole Foods, Netflix, and Slack.

Other major outages included:

• Nov. 27, 2021: GitHub: two hours
• Oct. 4, 2021: Facebook: six hours
• June 8, 2021: Fastly: one hour
• June 17, 2021: Akami: four hours
• Aug. 24, 2021: Zoom: three hours
• March 15, 2021: Microsoft Teams: three hours
• April 12, 2021: Google: less than one hour
• June 24, 2021: CloudFlare: two hours
• May 11, 2021: Salesforce: five hours

These outages can be extremely costly for businesses, many of which are now heavily reliant on e-commerce models for revenue generation. According to a 2019 study by McKinsey & Company, the e-commerce industry was projected to reach 24 percent of total retail sales within five years. By the very next year, it had already surpassed that figure, hitting 33 percent in July 2020. Fueled by a pandemic-driven demand for products and services, the first half of 2020 saw an increase in e-commerce transactions equivalent to that of the previous 10 years.

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“The most important takeaway from 2021’s notable outages is that no company – big or small – is immune to downtime and outages. However, it is possible to mitigate downtime with proactive website performance monitoring that alerts site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams the moment speed, latency, or availability issues are detected,” said Uptime.com CMO Yoni Solomon.

To protect their websites and applications against downtime, the average Uptime.com customer has more than 12 active web monitoring checks actively running at one-to-60 minute intervals across their sites. These checks test everything from HTTP(S) and SSL certificates, to APIs, web forms, and shopping carts. Additionally, more than 3000 users have integrated Uptime.com alerts and response time metrics into their dashboard tools for real-time analysis; and into communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams for real-time alert notifications.

The website performance monitor recommends a proactive approach to website performance and uptime monitoring. Businesses can mitigate the impact, severity, and duration of downtime by adjusting sensitivity and location settings to prevent false positives. The team also stresses leveraging real-time analysis for comprehensive views of a website’s speed, performance, and availability data. Finally, public and internal website status pages can help manage expectations with employees and users alike when incidents do occur.

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