Uptime.com Releases December 2019 Website Downtime Outage Report

NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Uptime.com, an industry-leading website uptime and performance solution, has just released its new report highlighting December's biggest outages. The report indicates a staggering number of outages ranging from malware to ransomware to cyber attacks. Even more unsettling is that no particular industry was safe: government, big tech companies, school districts, and even the Vatican suffered downtimes, whether from benign or malicious intent.

"Think about phone apps, for example, and the backend services that power them. People rely on their phone for things like navigating in strange places, or making payments, and the consequences of having those services fail can be serious," explains Uptime.com's resident site reliability expert, John Arundel of Bitfield Consulting. Arundel adds, "and it's clear that with outages of healthcare systems (such as this month's Dexcom incident), there can be risks to patient safety, or even to life."

Dexcom's wearable system went down and stopped detecting drops in blood glucose levels for an entire weekend. Dexcom's lack of communication overshadowed the outage, leaving patients angry and without answers as they struggled to find backup testing methods. This phone app outage highlights one of many vulnerabilities that can remain undetected.

The outages highlighted in the report serve as an example to users to be mindful of managing access points and credentials. As infrastructure grows, monitoring becomes increasingly critical, complex, and must be scaled accordingly. 

The Vatican's Minecraft server, which was created with the intent to build a community that isn't so toxic, attracted the ire of trolls utilizing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to bring it down. Despite efforts to ban the perpetrators, the server was ultimately overrun. On a positive note, experienced IT and tech experts have joined in the fight to keep the Vatican's Minecraft server alive, and have taken steps to increase security, encouraging those who want to join to apply for whitelisting in the community Discord.

Discord, a free voice and chat app designed for the gaming community, also faced downtime issues in December that inconvenienced its massive user base of 250 million+ users worldwide. While the true cause is uncertain, Uptime.com speculates that the problem originated with Google and "may have been related to I/O performance on some cloud disks." Within two hours, Google resolved the issue.

Uptime provides a range of website performance products, resources and free tools to help businesses ensure their websites are running smoothly and effectively. Uptime.com is optimistic that moving forward in the new year, the monthly outage report will help emphasize the importance of security and responsible server administration. See the data these tools collected on the year's busiest shopping day.

For the full report, check out the Uptime.com December 2019 outage report.

About Uptime.com

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Manhattan, New York, Uptime.com is an industry-leading website uptime and performance solution. Its customers include well-known businesses like Kraft, BNP Paribas, SAGE Publishing and Autodesk. The company was co-founded by seasoned B2B software entrepreneurs. For more information, visit Uptime.com.

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