Data breaches don’t wait for a convenient time to strike. They sometimes take months to uncover. They are complicated beasts, but once you’ve uncovered them some complex rules kick in that determine when you need to report the breach. Reporting a breach can be a daunting prospect. You’ll need to make a public statement in most cases, you may need to report the breach, and there may be legal requirements.

This past month was a hot one for outages. The Facebook family of apps continues to struggle with multiple outages, the London Stock Exchange had to open late one day this past month, and banks across the world experienced issues. Here’s your August outage report, including insights from our own monitoring at the Uptime.com HQ.

What makes synthetic monitoring a crucial tool to measure the customer experience? When I buy something online, it takes about one to three minutes. That time depends on the complexity of forms I encounter, whether I have an account with the retailer, and how easy the site is to navigate. Of course, there are lots of other variables I don’t notice that also affect my buying experience.