Maintenance Update to Take Verizon Cloud Down Next Weekend

If your Verizon-hosted cloud data and services are unavailable this weekend, you can blame an extended maintenance update. But at least be thankful that Verizon (VZ) is giving plenty of notice for the downtime.

Starting at 1:00 a.m. EST on Saturday morning, the Verizon Cloud team will begin a major upgrade to its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The good news, though, is that the estimated two days of downtime may simply be a precautionary measure. The maintenance upgrade will begin on January 10, but according to a Gigaom article, the amount of downtime is likely over-estimated and the upgrade will make it possible to do future service updates without such an impact on customers.

“We do these upgrades periodically, the last one being right before Thanksgiving and there was zero impact,” the Verizon spokesperson was quoted as saying by Gigaom. During the previous upgrade, most customers were back up and running as normal within 12 hours. Only the worst-affected experienced 24 hours of downtime.

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Verizon informed its customers on New Year’s Eve about the upcoming downtime, giving them plenty of warning. Even so, it’s understandable that some customers weren’t happy with an upcoming outage of up to 48 hours.

The Register quoted Verizon in its explanation of the downtime: “We are conducting regularly scheduled system maintenance on Verizon Cloud next weekend. We’re adding several new features to the platform that will continue to improve the service for our enterprise customers. Updates of this nature typically require some system downtown and we have notified customers in advance to make sure they can plan accordingly. This is a standard practice in the industry. No customers in Australia will be impacted. We anticipate the update will take far less than 48 hours. Previous similar updates took about 24 hours.”

Also noted by The Register, several Twitter users contemplated on the acceptability of taking a cloud service down for even a matter of minutes — let alone up to two days. It’s a good point, but if Verizon’s hints turn out to be true, future maintenance downtime could be significantly lessened, it not eliminated.