Cloud computing rivals Google and Microsoft suffer server outages
Submitted by Gina on September 11, 2011 - 6:33pm
Last week, both Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. faced obstructions in their Cloud computing systems. Online monitoring confirmed Google Docs outage for around an hour; while Microsoft Hotmail, Office 365 and SkyDrive were offline for over three hours.
On Sept. 7, Google Docs word teamwork application was strangled for an hour, creating inconvenience and resulting in inaccessibility to millions of documents, drawings, and Applications Scripts. Following Google breakdown, Microsoft online services – Hotmail, Office 365 software, and SkyDrive – were also interrupted for three hours on Sept. 8.
Google and Microsoft explain the errors
Google Inc. in its corporate blog post, made clear that its Cloud computing outage was occurred owing to a memory management bug, activated by software engineers in order to amend real time coactions inside the document list.
Google Engineering Director Alan Warren elaborated, giving technical explanation, in the blog posting, "Every time a Google Doc is modified, a machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory management bug, the lookup machines didn't recycle their memory properly after each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart. While they restarted, their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines—making them run out of memory even faster."
On the other hand, Microsoft’s Cloud computing's three hour outage was all the more serious. Due to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem, its Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365 services crashed. DNS is a tool which transfers domain names into numerical IP addresses to create Internet traffic globally.
Microsoft tweeted on its Office 365 Twitter account, thanking the users for bearing with the company. The company confirmed the services are long restored, but urged users to inform the company if they were still facing any issues.
