It’s been a rocky few weeks for some of the biggest internet-based businesses around. New stories of serious technical faults hit the headlines with alarming regularity through the end of June.
Havoc ensued when Amazon Web Services, the cloud-based hosting company behind many of the world's best known websites, was affected by a major storm in Virginia on the night of Friday 29th June. Websites including Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix went down. Pinterest and Netflix were back up by the following morning, with Instagram taking slightly longer to recover.
The new week started badly for Microsoft. One day after the announcement of their $1.2 billion acquisition of enterprise social networking site, Yammer, it promptly went offline. The problem was fixed within a couple of hours, but it wasn't the publicity Microsoft wanted or needed as it planned to push Yammer out to the world.
Of course, June had already been a pretty shocking month in terms of technology. LinkedIn's security breach resulted in six million leaked passwords, and ultimately, in a $5 million law suit. Ouch.
If you bank with Natwest or RBS, you’ll be all too familiar with their recent fiasco. Glitches in the system caused chaos as customers' funds failed to clear, forcing many to beg, borrow and steal their way through the last week of June.
Problems have continued well into July, with a major network outage for O2 that began on Wednesday still being resolved as of Thursday morning. Wednesday evening wasn't much better for the BBC; due to "a major technical issue" the BBC website crashed and problems continued for a couple of hours.
Thanks to a lot of incredibly clever techies out there, we're usually blissfully unaware of the technical issues that occur regularly behind the scenes of the businesses we trust. What this series of extreme and well publicised events highlights, is that in the fragile and unpredictable world of technology, it happens - even to the best of us!