Atlassian, cloud software giant and developer of popular tools such as Jira and Confluence, suffered a service outage on April 5th, 2022, according to their service status page (https://status.atlassian.com/).
Atlassian claims only around 400 of its 226,000 clients are affected, but that the process to restore service to those clients may take as long as another two weeks. In the meantime, Atlassian can't guarantee the affected customers won't lose data either due to the outage or during the rebuild process.
Outages caused by botched updates or poorly-reviewed scripts aren't new in the cloud service provider world. Even giants like Amazon Web Services have unplanned downtime. The issue in Atlassian's case is that the company just doesn't seem to care very much about the losses this outage are causing for its clients. Aside from updates posted on the company's Twitter account, there has been a deafening silence about the prolonged service outage.
The restore process appears to be very manual, requiring hundreds of Atlassian engineers to be deployed. Atlassian seems proud of the fact that they're working hard to fix an issue they and only they caused. The optics here really aren't great for Atlassian.
Here, we arrive at a more general problem with the entire SaaS (software as a service) paradigm. We're entrusting giant tech companies who don't have very much accountability or external oversight with not only our data, but our livelihoods. Smaller tech companies have failed because bigger tech companies were incompetent. The trickle-down effects here are real. In absence of sweeping regulation of giant, abusive tech companies, having a local, proactive tech solutions provider like Geek Housecalls can only improve your chances of surviving a widespread or long-lasting cloud service outage.
We are advocates, always, of local backups and on-premises infrastructure specifically because of the spotty reliability and ever-changing service terms of big cloud service companies. Your data is not backed up if it is only backed up to the cloud. Your software isn't really your software if it exists purely as a service on a cloud provider's servers. This isn't to say you don't *need* cloud services to achieve greater operational efficiency in your own business, or that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater; it is to say, however, that consolidation in tech is bad for all of us and that redundancy can mean the difference between life and death for your business.
Get in touch with Geek Housecalls today for a free review of your business's IT situation and let us offer you peace of mind that, in the next outage, your business doesn't go down with the ship.