Monthly round-up of IT outages

October 2015 saw a lot of problems for Outlook.com, with people unable to log-in, receive or send messages, with a number of users reportedly told their correct username or password was incorrect. In light of the recent hacking incidents in the news, many users took to online forums to try to find out if Outlook, or their individual accounts, had been hacked. With many people having continuous issues for long periods, the outage must have had a negative input on many businesses.

Telecommunications companies including BT, Three, Vodafone, and EE saw their fair share of outages through the month, according to downdetector.co.uk and its Outage Top 10. TalkTalk’s website was unavailable as a result of the cyber-attack that took place on its website on 21^st October.

In the month that many people are starting their Christmas shopping, it was poor timing for Argos to suffer an unplanned outage on Tuesday 27^th October. Many online customers saw an error message telling them there were too many visitors to the website, which didn’t ring true for some customers visiting the site in the early hours of the morning.  A wake-up call to everyone in the retail trade, of just how important it is to have a contingency plan in place; to not only ensure prompt resolution but also to communicate to all stakeholders and customers.

IT outages or downtime are not issues that can be ignored and should receive immediate attention. Reducing the mean time to resolution, improves customer satisfaction and a company’s reputation. By incorporating an effective Critical IT Alerting program into an IT Operations Policy, interruptions are organised and prioritised by incident type, location and severity and the most skilled, available IT expert is identified and supplied with up-to-date information to make the necessary repairs. If that expert is not contactable, the IT alerting solution can find the next available engineer and contact them; continuing the process until confirmation is received that someone is en-route. If the downtime is likely to impact on stakeholders and customers, they too can be contacted and kept updated throughout any incident.

For more information about Everbridge IT Alerting and how it can help your business to stay operational visit www.everbridge.com