Dropbox Experiences Global Outage, But Provides Good Communication

As if Dropbox isn’t enough of a target for its occasional security breaches and downtime, now its ever-growing number of competitors have another weapon in their arsenal. On the morning of May 30, Dropbox experienced a global outage that put a lot of customers out of connection with their online files.

Although Dropbox hadn’t yet provided an explanation for the outage, it did “man up” to its responsibilities and note the outage. Dropbox notified its customers quickly about the outage, but still, it’s one of those things that naysayers will use as evidence the company’s file sync and storage service is having problems. When you’re the big guy, everybody wants to pick a fight with you.

And maybe there’s good reason to do so. It’s important to keep companies on their toes and honest, and whenever there’s downtime, there’s frequently lost productivity, efficiency or revenue. Based on information from IsItDownRightNow, Dropbox was down for an unspecified period of time. It was up at 4:32 a.m. Pacific but down at 6:32 a.m. Pacific, and up again at 8:32 a.m. Pacific.

Not too bad, really, but likely devastating to Eastern time users who arrived at work to find Dropbox completely unavailable. The Twitterverse was a buzz with talk about the Dropbox outage, as it was back in January when Dropbox managed to win the award for first major cloud outage of the year.

Naturally, the outrage was pretty intense. Some of us didn’t even notice. (Hey, sorry, I’m on Mountain time; I was sleeping.)

What does this mean for cloud services? Probably very little. Unplanned downtime is simply a byproduct of any IT service, whether it’s in-house or somewhere out there in the cloud.

As cloud outages go, Dropbox was quick to notify its customer and also quick to get its service back online. That’s a lot when outages can go for hours or days.