Even Giants Fall: Yelp Servers Go Down

Back in May, we all learned a valuable lesson. Even the giants can stumble and fall. Yelp was down for the count for quite a few hours. However, it was not only the Yelp site that went down. Connected services went down with it. If your business is connected to Yelp in any way, this could have had a direct impact on you. Even if it didn't affect your business, it is still a word to the wise that downtime is inevitable no matter how big your business may be and that website monitoring is a must if you want to be on top of that downtime when it happens.

Networking Issues to Blame

According to Yelp, the downtime that occurred happened due to networking issues. Those networking issues prevented consumers from being able to log into any systems that use Yelp. Whether or not the networking issues were preventable remains to be seen. The website downtime happened whether it was preventable or not. However, this is proof that all website owners must take proactive measures to ensure that there aren't disasters waiting to happen, such as the disaster that Yelp encountered.

Website Monitoring Makes the Difference

Imagine if Yelp was not on top of their server and site monitoring. The downtime could have gone on for much longer than it did. Now imagine that it is your site that experiences a networking issue that brings your site and its services down. Unless you have quality website monitoring in place, you won't know the site is down until your customers notify you of the situation (if they can) or unless you try to access your site yourself. In the meantime, your site is losing money hand over fist. Again, this goes to show you, no matter how big or small your site may be, no one is immune to unplanned website downtime. It is your job as the owner of a site to ensure that you know about downtime the moment it happens so your customers (and your profits) are impacted as little as possible.