With the 2021 holiday season right around the corner and the COVID-19 pandemic still prevalent, businesses are being conducted online now more than ever. The holiday rush also comes with incidents like websites going down, slow load times, and even possible hacking attempts. While planning to tackle the sudden increase in website traffic during the festive season, businesses must have an incident response plan in place to handle unexpected outages and the consequent surge in customer inquiries.

On October 4, 2021, Facebook services went off the grid gradually, and then suddenly at 15:39 UTC. It took nearly six hours to restore service to normal. With over 3.5 billion users facing a lengthy downtime using one or multiple products from Facebook, Inc. (now known as Meta Platforms, Inc.) conversations flooded the internet about what caused the downtime issues on the American social networking service.

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral approach that enables DevOps and developers to collect performance metrics in a standardized manner. Currently a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project, OpenTelemetry was conceived by merging OpenCensus, Google's open-source method of collecting metrics and traces, and OpenTracing, a vendor-neutral API to collect traces.

On June 2, 2019, Google Cloud Platform had a major network outage that disrupted the services of Discord, Spotify, and Snapchat, among many others. The root cause was a benign misconfiguration coupled with a software bug that caused the loss of configuration data. The issue was resolved almost four hours later after the lost configuration data was rebuilt and redistributed.

On September 4, 2021 a major submarine cable broke down in Vietnam causing network connectivity issues for a large portion of the population. Organizations hosted online and those with data centers outside those perimeters were hit the worst with most of their applications down or running extremely slow.

Have you been a frustrated customer at the end of the service line waiting to achieve a resolution for your problem? After all the waiting, you'll hear a voice giving you a standard response: your request will be addressed and resolved soon. An incident need not be a harrowing experience, but can be turned into a positive customer experience using customizable and publicly accessible status pages for timely incident communication.

The word "forecast" typically brings to mind weather predictions that have evolved through sources like snippets on television, newspaper columns, or the very popular, "Alexa, what's today's weather?" However, a financial forecast is something very different.