In the last month we’ve seen major outages on:
- 20% of the internet powered by Microsoft Azure – caused by a behind-the-scenes configuration change
- 1000s of sites powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) – a result of errors which meant its internal systems could not connect websites with the IP addresses computers use to find them
- WhatsApp – globally
- Vodafone – both mobile and broadband – triggered by a non-malicious software issue with one of their vendor partners
- BT, Virgin Media, EE, and more – due to an internet outage
On a smaller scale there are regular ISP outages affecting millions of businesses. A survey conducted by YouGov, revealed that: 51% of UK fixed business connectivity customers experienced an outage in the past year. Overall, the UK economy lost £17.6 billion due to fixed business connectivity outages in the past year, with London businesses alone losing £5.7 billion.
In fact networking/connectivity now leads in terms of financial investment priorities for UK businesses over the next year (40%), surpassing cybersecurity (39%) and AI (35%).
Neil Mcmanus of GHM Communications says: “We all depend so much on the internet for everything from cloud-based services to communication with suppliers and customers. And as our reliance on the internet grows, even brief outages that we might have been able to deal with previously are now way more impactful. This is only going to increase.
“With the level of automation and complexity of our networks also growing, it’s impossible to avoid outages entirely. What you want from your provider is to understand why it’s happened and reassurance that they will get you back online as quickly as humanly possible.
“SLAs provide some level of reassurance as to what promises—if any —that a provider will do our provide if there’s a problem. We offer SLAs on all our voice and connectivity solutions at GHM.”
“For businesses where connectivity is critical there are additional solutions to safeguard operations.
“Finally, regular network audits and stress testing can identify potential vulnerabilities before they lead to outages.”