2021 was not much different from 2020 concerning the pandemic. However, it did give many the opportunity to focus on the way forward with offices around the globe opening up, at least partially. At Site24x7, we also started to focus on monitoring other IT components along with remote work infrastructure. Grab a look at our infrastructure monitoring releases if you missed our announcements and “what's new” updates.
From coping with life during a pandemic, to getting updated for the new virus variants, to witnessing a major outage of the social media stalwart, to rebuilding hope with the vaccines, 2021 has been an eventful year. We, at Zoho, managed to run our services smoothly in a hybrid mode with employees working from home as well as from our offices. Our journey in 2021 was fueled by the support from our dedicated customers and that helped us meet our goals for the year.
As the world is trying to regain its usual pace, we at Site24x7 have been engrossed in churning out new features to help organizations enhance the health of their IT resources and meet their evolving monitoring needs. We've drafted a summary of notable features to look back on our achievements this year. We extended our monitoring capabilities for Kubernetes, network traffic, ISP latency, VMware ESXi hardware, and Mobile APM for React Native apps.
As we continue to adapt following the pandemic, which has impact us all both personally and professionally, we take this moment to commemorate the IT veterans we've lost to the pandemic. With the pandemic drastically changing the way we do business, we have conducted a study to understand the state of IT management at the height of these radical changes and analyzed how to offer a holistic approach to changing IT management needs to prepare for the post-pandemic IT world.
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.
