11/05/2014

Website Outages from 2012 to 2014

Website monitoring is critical for a business online irrespective of its size. Website downtime directly leads to losses. According to a recent survey by Ponemon, a single minute of downtime leads to $7,900 of loss and for ecommerce sites, the number is as high as $66,240 for every minute. 8 hours of downtime on any business day would result in $100,000 loss for all small businesses, and $1,696,000 for big businesses. Website uptime, is therefore, one of the determining factors of business success.

User experience, reputation of the website/brand, search engine rankings and website traffic, all can be at risk due to website downtime.

Let's take a look at some of the instances where big companies experienced outages and sustained great losses.

Sl. No. Company Date Website Down Location Time Costs
1 Facebook 03-Sep-14   15 minutes Facebook loses about $22,453 every minute when it's down around the globe
2 Google Services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents 24-Jan-14 US, Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world 25 minutes and for 10% people 30 more minutes All Google services went down worldwide, frustrating millions of users
3 Amazon.com 31-Jan-13   49 minutes Lost $5 billion in revenue
4 Amazon.com 19-Aug-13 US East-1 region 30 minutes $66,240 per minute or nearly $2 million ñ based on Amazonís 2012 net sales
5 OTC Market Group Inc. 07-Nov-13 US Around 3.5 hours  
6 Google 16-Aug-13 Global Less than 5 minutes Lost $545,000 in revenue
7 GoDaddy 10-Sep-12   Approximately 6 hours Millions of websites went down and lost about $50,000 in revenue
8 Amazon (AWS) 29-Jun-12, 22-Oct-12, 24-Dec-12 US East-1 region   29 June - affected many popular services and made extensive damage by impacting websites like Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram 22 Oct - Impact on many major sites like reditt, Imgur and Heroku 24 Dec - Impact on several websites including Netflix
9 Google App Engine, Tumblr, Dropbox 26-Oct-12   Google app engine for 4 hours A large number of app engine users and services were affected and traffic dropped reporting major losses in North America

Website downtime can thus be disastrous, whether it is a small or a big business. Therefore, it is important to use a quality website monitoring service to track the downtime and ensure that the website is available at any given point in time.

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