A large number of Facebook users have reported that profiles and pages on the service had a few hours of downtime on November 8 2013. The issue, affecting profiles from approximately 10:30am Eastern Standard Time until 1pm, prevented page content from loading, and instead showed the error “Sorry, but this page didn’t load properly. Please try again.”

A spokesperson stated:  ”Earlier today, we experienced an issue that prevented some people from loading Timeline or Pages content for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and content is back to normal. We’re sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused.”

Though no reason for the fault was provided by the company, the wording of the statement strongly suggests that the issue is something caused internally, rather than an external attack.

References:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/11/08/profile.outage.follows.similar.incident.on.october.21st/

On Wednesday, October 30^th 2013, at 2:35 AM UTC  Windows Azure experienced  an issue that affected a management feature in the compute section of the public cloud, and was finally resolved Thursday morning.

Microsoft’s update on Service Dashboard stated “Manual actions to perform Swap Deployment operations on Cloud Services may error, which will then restrict Service Management functions.”

It took Microsoft more than a day to solve the problem, but fortunately the issue did not affect any of the applications running on Azure.

Reference:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2059901/microsofts-windows-azure-cloud-hit-by-worldwide-management-interuption.html

http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-azure-hit-with-worldwide-partial-outage

Between 5:25 AM and 5:52 AM PDT on October 28 Amazon experienced increased API error rates and latencies in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Reference:

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

On October 27^th HealthCare.gov, an American healthcare insurance marketplace, went down because of a network failure at Verizon’s Terremark cloud service. Following the recovery HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement:

“Verizon Terremark successfully resolved the issue with the networking component overnight, and as of 7 a.m. ET this morning the Data Services Hub was fully operational. The HealthCare.gov technical team continued troubleshooting one issue with the online account creation process in the application and has now opened the online application and enrollment tools back up to consumers.”

The outage was the latest in a series of technical glitches for the site, including long waits for service for users and problems in delivering information to insurance carriers on the back end.

However, this was the first problem caused by a cloud service provider.

The failure originated in a Verizon Terremark data center and likely affected other companies that purchase computing power from the tech giant, though Verizon has thus far not responded to media inquiries on the cause of the problem. It is also unclear how many potential customers attempted to reach the site while it was down only to receive a message that said: “We are experiencing technical difficulties and hope to have them resolved soon. Please try again later.”

The outage affected both the Federally Facilitated Exchange which serves insurance customers in 36 states, and the individual exchanges in 14 states and the District of Columbia. The state-based health insurance exchanges as well as the federal system, are dependent on the data hub to operate properly.

Later on, it was announced The Department of Health and Human Services signed a contract with Hewlett-PackardCo. to replace Verizon Communications Inc.’s Terremark subsidiary as its web-hosting provider for the federal health-insurance marketplace.

Resources:

http://fcw.com/articles/2013/10/28/cloud-failure-crashes-healthcare-gov.aspx

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303562904579224491970912988

The streaming video service portion of Netflix went down for many users in North America on October 24 2013. The outage started around 9:30 PM, and while it has not affected all users, a number have taken to Twitter and Facebook to complain about videos and movies not loading, or errors on the Netflix website.

Netflix issued the following statement at 9:40 PM:

“We’re aware that some members are experiencing issues streaming movies and TV shows. We’re working to resolve the problem.”

The company appeared to deal with the technical difficulties after around two hours after it started. The video streaming service started to work again at around 11:00 PM, and a spokesperson from Netflix confirmed the resolution of the issue.

References:

http://www.szsu.com/2013/10/24/netflix-down-service-unavailable-for-many-users/

http://empowerednews.net/netflix-experiences-service-disruption/1845793/

The social-networking Web site went down for some users on Monday October 21 2013, with people unable to post a status update or even access the site.

Facebook has confirmed via a statement that there were issues that popped up during network maintenance. Here’s the full statement:

“Earlier this morning, while performing some network maintenance, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We’re sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. “

References :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57608419-93/facebook-outages-fixed-now-back-to-100/

http://mashable.com/2013/10/21/facebook-currently-doesnt-allow-status-updates/

Amazon experienced downtime twice on October 18 2013. Between 1:55 AM and 2:46 AM PDT there were increased error rates and latencies for the EC2 APIs in US-EAST-1 Region. During this period some describe API requests for VPC resources reported inconsistent information.

Between 3:24 AM and 5:29 AM PDT Amazon experienced error rates and latencies for the EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Between 5:20 AM and 6:35 AM PDT some API requests were rate-limited and returned a RequestLimitExceeded response.

Reference:

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

On October 3^rd 2013 Adobe posted a security announcement stating that their security team had discovered an attack on Adobe’s network. The attack resulted in a loss of information of 2.9 million customers including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. Many of the affected customers were users of Revel and Adobe Creative Cloud. There was also an investigation of the illegal access to source code of numerous Adobe products.

The news was, however, shared with the Internet community several hours before Adobe’s official announcement by Brian Krebs of the Krebs on Security blog. Krebs said that the week before, he and fellow security researcher Alex Holden of Hold Security “discovered a massive 40GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet, and Kroll Background America.”

References:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425215,00.asp

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/10/important-customer-security-announcement.html

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/adobe-to-announce-source-code-customer-data-breach/

While recently published video game Grand Theft Auto 5 keeps breaking all sales records, its developer, Rockstar Games, has been experiencing major issues with the cloud service that’s responsible for saving user game data. A number of players have reported a loss of character, game money, items and more when playing GTA Online.  Although Rockstar at first seemed to be trying to get back the lost data, on October 11^th 2013 at 3 PM ET they apologized to all of the players affected by the problem and posted the following message:

“For those asking about their lost characters or rank, those will not be able to be restored so we sincerely hope that this cash stimulus we’re giving out this month will help you get back on your feet or to make your new life in Los Santos & Blaine extra sweet.”

Reference:

http://support.rockstargames.com/hc/en-us/articles/200435267-Loss-of-characters-rank-items-apartments-and-or-in-game-money-in-GTA-Online