The first quarter of the year raised hackles among cloud users as outages involving Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Cloud Services hit users throughout the world, prompting systems administrators to rethink site engineering, especially among businesses that are heavily reliant on cloud-based mission-critical applications.
The largest OCI outage occurred in February, affecting customers in Africa, the Asia Pacific, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. According to Oracle’s official statement, company engineers pinpointed a performance issue in the backend infrastructure that supports OCI’s Public DNS API. The issue prevented incoming service requests from being processed throughout the duration of the outage.
Oracle updated customers once it implemented an adaptive migration approach that used real-time backend optimization. The system’s DNS Load Management was also fine-tuned to handle service requests.
Numerous Issues
Among customers using API Gateway, OCI Search with OpenSearch, OCI Vault, and Oracle Digital Assistant, many experienced 5xx-type server errors. Identity customers, on the other hand, ran into trouble when they tried to create or modify new domains.
Additional issues plagued those using Oracle Management Cloud as they could neither create new instances nor delete existing instances. Similar problems were also encountered by customers on Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle Content Management, Oracle Integration Cloud, and Oracle Visual Builder Studio.
Problems with Recovering Data
Meanwhile, NetSuite users flocked to Reddit to complain about being unable to recover any data posted at least half an hour prior to the outage. It was noted that the restoration point for the data was around 30 minutes before the outage.
While NetSuite usually provides a report or a list of transactions done during the period when customers couldn’t retrieve their data, many users complained that they ended up trying to manually retrieve lost data, then selectively importing it to a new NetSuite instance.
According to an Oracle spokesperson, NetSuite’s availability over the past year was pegged at around 99.6%.
Ironically, the outages occurred just a few months after Oracle chief exec Larry Ellison boasted that Oracle cloud services never go down.
Not the Only One
But Oracle is far from the only cloud provider that suffered outages in Q1-2023.
Back in February, a global outage affected Microsoft Outlook and Teams. This came to a couple of weeks after another Microsoft outage that impacted these two applications, as well as Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online users around the globe.