If you are a Sony PlayStation owner or had anything much to do with the Sony network this weekend, you probably were not a happy camper. Saturday morning, February the 8th, the Sony network went down and stayed down for nearly 20 hours.
Sony stayed pretty tight-lipped about the issue, letting users know via two posts on X that they were aware of the outage and working on it, and another when the service was restored. Sony hasn’t provided any details of what happened, which is not making users feel very comfortable. Questions of a potential hack or data breach haven’t been answered. Compensation so far has been five free days for PlayStation Plus members.
Consumers often forget that these gaming platforms are cloud-based, which means they are hosted on server farms in respective data centers. Most games also come in a digital-only form that at least requires a phone home to that cloud infrastructure before you can play. The days of tossing a disc in a console and enjoying your favorite title stand-alone are a thing of the past. Gamers no longer own a physical copy of the game, just a license to play, which can be revoked anytime a publisher sees fit. Cloud service dependence is a must. Let’s pivot from gaming to productivity and see what cloud-driven services do.
The most recent Microsoft 365 outage, on December 10th, 2024, was large enough to make national headlines. Our dependence on corporate cloud infrastructure continues to increase. Approximately 96 percent of businesses use Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365 for their daily workflow. In 2024, Google held 50.34 percent of the option, while Microsoft Office 365 had 45.46 percent.
For the most part, we don’t think about these services, and we don’t want to. Our devices work, and the apps on those devices work. When we log in to the workplace again, we expect it to work and our data to be there. And most of the time, that’s the case. Rarely do we consider issues that would make those services unstable or even unavailable; it could be something as simple as a fiber cut between your location and the cloud service provider. Often, fiber is just one fiber; there’s not always a detour.
Numerous hardware or software issues can impact your access, such as a routine upgrade or maintenance window gone wrong, as in the Cloud Strike event of 2024. This event brought businesses, airlines, schools, streaming services, and more down for the count while a fix was deployed. Then there’s also the sinister things that happen such as security events, unauthorized access, where data is often stolen or compromised.
How much do these companies owe consumers in terms of a reason for an outage? While Terms of Service agreements often contain clauses to direct some of these questions, companies must be mindful of how much they share, which could open themselves to litigation. While most consumers believe that if a service is down, then compensation is deserved, sometimes it’s just a product of doing business in the cloud. None of us are paying enough at the consumer level to warrant redundancy or backup of any service. We take it for granted that the cloud provider covers all that.
In short, none of us have direct access to our data or even know where it’s stored. Most providers have infrastructure worldwide. If that provider has an issue that impacts your data, there’s no guarantee that your data will be restored. We all use cloud services daily; we don’t notice a problem until something doesn’t work, right? If something happens and you can’t get your data, it’s often a loss. While the cloud is nice and convenient, keeping a copy of your most essential data locally is always a good idea. Keep in mind, if you’re a business owner, you might need access locally to critical data to continue operations such as payroll and invoicing should disaster strike. Depending on your size of personal or business needs, products like a Synology NAS offer apps to back up your data from cloud services and, in some cases, provide service substitutes.
In the event of an outage, you might not be able to access some of your creature’s comforts. Still, at least business could continue to your cloud provider come back online, and you wouldn’t have to worry about critical data during the process. Gamers, while it would be nice if those servers never had issues, that’s not the case. Would it be nice if games didn’t have to “phone home” and you could play them without an internet connection? Of course, but we aren’t there yet with all titles.
We all use cloud services. We’ve gone from local disks and servers to a cloud infrastructure run off-site. Hackers, data breaches, and outages are part of any infrastructure, but it’s important to think about what happens when or if those same cloud services have a stormy day.
Image Via Synology
