Dependence on the public cloud and other 3rd party tech services continued to grow in 2021, with Gartner projecting that global spending on cloud services will surpass $482 billion in 2022, up 54% from 2020. But businesses that rely on 3rd party tech for mission-critical activities need to understand and mitigate any risks - particularly tech downtime.

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We assembled the most notable outages of 2021 - some on the public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), some involving Content Delivery Networks (Fastly, Akamai), and others involving private data centers.  

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The outages are arranged in chronological order on a timeline. Click on any outage to learn what went down and why:

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Downtime happens all the time. Some events are short lived while others last for hours, making headlines and impacting millions of businesses and end-users across the globe. Most of us remember the AWS outages of December 2021, and the big October Facebook outage before that. They impacted revenue streams, operations and productivity, costing businesses millions in damages. But they also caused immense reputational damages and added to the fears of anyone who relies on the cloud for day-to-day operations - businesses and end-users alike.

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Parametrix cloud monitoring systems go beyond searching for outages on status pages and google news. Our systems detected  downtime events in real time, and in 2021 identified an event every week and a half, on average. These included latencies, interruptions and full out outages - all having some impact on business. The longest lasted 11 hours, while the shortest measured well under an hour.