- Following the latest global outage, a new study identified the work-related services and platforms that had the most outages.
- Outlook had the longest major crashes, with an average outage time of 5 hours.
- Gmail’s major outages affected 1.8 billion users worldwide, which is over 20% of the world population.
A recent study by TRG Datacenters analyzed the top 30 work-related platforms and services to identify the ones that had the most major crashes. Data about the outages in the last 12 months, average outage duration and the total affected users were taken into account to give the services a reliability score. For this score the study considers only major outages during which a service was unavailable with all its functions. The platforms are ranked by the number of major crashes with the reliability score as an additional context.
Here is a short summary.
The work platform with the most crashes is Monday.com with 10 major outages happening last year, almost once a month. The outages lasted for 45 minutes on average, affecting 225,000 users. This frequency of crashes puts the reliability score at 25.5, the lowest in the ranking.
Gmail and Microsoft teams had 6 crashes in the last year. Gmail’s major crashes affected over 1.8 billion users worldwide which is over 20% of the world population. Its outages lasted 3.5 hours on average, greatly impacting global communications. Microsoft Teams had the longest outages in the list, lasting over 5 hours and affecting 280 million users.
Slack and Outlook had 5 crashes over the previous 12 months. Just like Microsoft Teams, Outlook has the longest average duration of a major crash, lasting around 5 hours and affecting a 400-million user base.
Compared to Outlook, Slack’s 5 major crashes were over 6 times shorter. They also affected only 18 million users worldwide. Slack’s faster response to the outages gives it a higher reliability rating of 45.8, 2 times higher than for Microsoft Teams.
Google Drive, GitHub, ClickUp, Salesforce, Zoom and Notion had 4 crashes over the last 12 months.
Google Drive’s major crashes affected over a billion people, 1/8th of the world population, for around 90 minutes on average. Compared to Gmail, Google Drive outages are two times shorter. While Google Drive experiences major outages every three months on average, this cloud platform has a high reliability score of 61.7.
GitHub, ClickUp and Salesforce experienced similar outages, all going down four times last year with an average outage lasting around 90 minutes. GitHub’s user base is ten times smaller than for Google Drive but the platform crashes still affected around 100 million people which results in a lower reliability score of 46.7.
As smaller platforms, Salesforce and ClickUp crashes affect less people, so their reliability scores are average, 45 and 45.1 respectively.
Just as GitHub and Google Drive, Zoom had 4 major outages during the last 12 months. The longer crashes that lasted for 2.5 hours on average affected over 300 million people around the world. The longer downtime as well as a wide user base affected by it leads to the lower reliability score of 44.
Notion closes the ranking of the work-related platforms with the most crashes with similar 4 outages in one year. The platform was down for 2 hours on average and affected 10 times less users than Zoom with 30 million people.
A spokesperson for TRG Datacenters commented on the matter. “The reliability of a platform is easy to keep, when there are not that many users. The game changes when a single mistake affects millions or even billions of people, even if it lasts for 30 minutes. The reliability of a service/platform becomes more important when enterprises want to depend on them to deliver results. At the same time, we cannot forget that these platforms have users worldwide in different time zones, meaning that not all of the users actually got affected.”
