Dropbox Goes Down
It's every cloud user's biggest nightmare: what happens when a cloud service goes down? Yet, it can happen at any moment. It happened to Dropbox users yesterday. For one whole hour, Dropbox was down. Smack in the middle of a busy Thursday morning. This caused wide-spread panic amongst Dropbox users – especially those that use the cloud-based management system for work purposes. 
What happened? That remains to be seen. Dropbox has acknowledged the blackout, but the company has not offered up any explanations. The company did send out an apology note via Twitter. How often do cloud-based site go down? The last time this happened to Dropbox users, it was a brisk January morning. Dropbox isn't alone, though, so many cloud companies shut down unexpectedly.
The Hard Core Data
The website Is It Down Right Now? lets people know what sites are up and running, and which ones are currently off the grid. This site checks all the major cloud-based websites and services that you might use regularly like Dropbox, Facebook, and others. Most of the time, things do run smoothly. If you look at some company stats, most cloud companies do actually run just fine 99% of the time.
Why all the worry and concern about cloud services going down? A lot of these worries seem to be based on rumor and little else. The fact of the matter is that all servers shut down occasionally. The difference is that people store active data in clouds, and not being able to reach this data can be really scary. Should you move completely to the cloud?
Dropbox Goes Down: Things to Consider When Going Cloud
It's always a good idea to have some form of backup data. This way, if a cloud-based company experiences shut down for no reason (as was the case with Dropbox), you still have something to work with. Otherwise, you'll have to wait for that site to be back up and running (and, believe me, site admins work as fast as possible to make sure things are up quickly!).
Even though Dropbox didn't explain why the service was shut down for an hour, Dropbox users don't seem to be too angry. Today, the service is up and running as usual, and a simple apology from the company has seemed to suffice nicely. If you run a cloud-base service, use this recent Dropbox problem as an example. Sometimes, things just happen.
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