100% uptime is impossible, so get the right IT support

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ll know that last week, Facebook experienced a colossal outage that lasted a whopping six hours. That meant that not only were billions of people around the world unable to access Facebook itself, but they were also unable to use the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging service, or Facebook-owned Instagram, or Facebook-owned Oculus, or other Facebook-run online services.

As the world and his dog took to Twitter for their social media fix, what we were all experiencing first hand is a fact that those of us in the IT world know all too well: that even the world’s biggest tech giants don’t manage to keep their services online 100% of the time. And if even behemoths like Facebook don’t have the budget to stay up and running without fail, it’s fair to say that us mere mortals with smaller businesses definitely can’t solve the problem with money either.

What caused the Facebook outage?

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that the complex workings of a platform like Facebook are perhaps more likely to run into IT problems that bring them crashing down, or that they’re a more likely target for hacking and other types of cyber crime that could knock them offline. While there may be an element of truth in that, nobody is invincible, whether big or small. And Facebook is clearly better protected than the average business – and backed by an eye-watering budget.

This is how the events unfolded in Facebook’s own words:

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

If you didn’t really understand a word of that, we don’t blame you (and there’s a more detailed look at what happened here, but it’s not light reading). Put more simply, there was no foul play at work here. Instead, it seems to have been good old-fashioned human error that was to blame.

Because what Facebook has subsequently admitted is that all it took to bring down Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more was just one wrong command issued during what Facebook Vice-President Santosh Janardhan described as a ‘routine maintenance job’.

Frightening how easy it is to take your own online services offline, isn’t it?

When the worst happens, you need the right IT support

If the Facebook incident taught us anything, it’s that there’s no budget in the world big enough to keep your online services running flawlessly 100% of the time. So what can you do to protect your business from the damage that can be done by being thrown offline?

If your IT infrastructure can’t be 100% reliable – which it can’t – make sure you have IT support that IS 100% reliable.

With our managed IT support services, you’ll have the peace of mind that when things do go wrong, we’ll be around to help – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We’ll also proactively monitor your services so that we’ll immediately know when something’s amiss. This means we can nip the problem in the bud and prevent a small issue from turning into a disaster for your business.

If you’d like to have the reassurance that someone’s on hand to help when the unexpected happens, give us a call on 01509 80 85 86 or email us at [email protected] to find out more about our IT support services.

Posted on: 11th October 2021.