Verizon Starts 2015 With Weekend Downtime

Verizon’s enterprise cloud will go offline for two days this coming weekend due to scheduled maintenance.

The maintenance downtime will start on Saturday January 10 at 1am EST and is scheduled to go offline for 48 hours.

Enterprise cloud

Verizon launched its cloud push in 2011 following a $1.4bn acquisition of Terremark, with 2014 seeing the company announce its enterprise cloud, a competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

A Verizon spokesperson told Gigaom that the customer service representative most likely ‘overstated’ the length of the downtime, and that the work will be helping to ensure future updates to the platform will not impact customers.

“We do these upgrades periodically, the last one being right before Thanksgiving and there was zero impact,” he said. In that case, all customer VMs were back up in 24 hours and most within 12 hours, he said to Gigaom.

One Twitter user, Kenn White, questioned how Verizon can compete in the cloud market with such downtimes:

Verizon responded with a further tweet, claiming that 48 hours is the maximum window of downtime for the maintenance, and services may actually just be down for 24 hours.

The end of 2014 saw a flurry of outages from most of the big cloud competitors. Parts of Amazon Web Services went offline in September when a Xen hypervisor issue meant that around 10 percent of Amazon’s EC2 instances had to be rebooted.

Microsoft’s Azure went down in November, subsequently knocking out MSN.com and sotrage services in North and Western Europe.

Just before Christmas, Rackspace suffered a DDoS attack which took down services for almost 12 hours.