We have to admit that so many outages recently did have us pondering the possible conspiracy theories - twitching to reach for the old tin-foil hat.
Ebay's down-time seemed simple and believable enough - it said maintenance had over-run. It happens. But the Nasdaq outage last week seemed all the more sinister with questions still being posed.
According to Reuters the Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext operators, who suffered similar problems when systems broke down for around three hours, have been unable to agree on a full explanation. In what is almost certainly an unrelated event, Amazon suffered its second outage in a week on Sunday at lunch-time, Pacific Time, for about an hour.
The problem was based on a hardware failure at the firm's US-East data centre in North Virginia which led to spiraling problems at a host of online services including Instagram, Vine, AirBnB and mobile magazine app Flipboard.
The glitches with a single networking device - known as a 'grey' partial failure - resulted in data loss and is still the subject of analysis within the firm and lingering questions from outside.
But Business Week suggested that, rather than analysing the specifics, a broader question needs to be asked about over-reliance on geographically-specific services from firms that preach that such practices are now redundant.
In the age of the Web and the Cloud, why are firms so evidently reliant on single cloud providers, single systems and single data centres. It's certainly not what hi-tech firms would advise of their customers - as my several portable storage devices and my back-up laptop will testify.
While it would be fascinating to find out the root cause of Ebay's and Amazon's problems, we suspect we will be given fairly glib and technologically baffling responses rather than something more digestible (such as an engineer left a spanner in the core server or we have been under persistent attack from overseas-government funded hackers).
The Nasdaq situation mat be more interesting to follow since the Securities and Exchange Commission has, rather obviously, taken an interest and is unlikely to be fobbed-off with platitudes. It may help shed light on wider issues for those of us holding data or relying on others to do so.
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