Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Given recent global events, UptimeRobot is experiencing an increased number of downtime notifications. We are currently sending out five times more notifications than usual due to a widespread power outage impacting several critical services worldwide. Here’s a brief overview of the situation and how it affects our monitoring services.

On July 18, 2024 at 6:38 pm ET, Vantage DX, Martello’s Microsoft 365 and Teams performance management solution, started to see indicators of a likely Microsoft outage impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. Almost an hour later at 7:41 pm ET Microsoft issued a statement on X.

In a recent unexpected turn of events, a faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update led to widespread outages, crashing Windows systems globally. The repercussions were felt across various sectors, including airports, TV stations, hospitals, and even emergency services in the U.S. and Canada. The glitch, affecting both Windows workstations and servers, resulted in massive outages, bringing entire companies to a standstill and crashing fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers.

As we write, on Friday July 19th, a massive global cyber outage is continuing to take down critical services around the world dependent on Microsoft-based computers.

Today, the entire world is feeling the pain of a major software outage. While we know a lot about these occurrences—our entire business is built on helping companies manage incidents and outages effectively—we’re not here to share our opinion on it. Instead, we’d like to help those unfamiliar with the incident lifecycle understand what happens when an outage like this occurs, who is responsible for what, and what companies ultimately do to get things working again.

The recent global outage caused by an operating system update reminded me of how vulnerable we are today and most importantly, how close we are always teetering on global scale incidents with millions of interconnected dependencies. When the base of the house collapses, everything built on top is impacted. Those of us in IT Operations, Monitoring, Observability (insert the current acronym), etc., know firsthand this risk; we face it every day.

For the rest of the world, these are just two synonyms. But in ITIL, the main IT service management framework, the distinction is crucial. Let’s find out.

Our On-call product has been in the wild for a few months now, and in this post I want to talk about building a time-sensitive system and what we did to handle some of the challenges. I’ll cover what our scheduler is responsible for, the basics of working with time, and talk a bit about how we tested our system.

Service operations (ServiceOps) is a technology-enabled approach that unifies IT operations and IT service (ITSM) teams and facilitates frictionless collaboration for more effective incident management. ServiceOps combines people, processes, and technology to improve visibility, workflows, and collaboration between otherwise siloed departments. Organizations of all sizes and industries worldwide have adopted ServiceOps.