Staff cutbacks cited as cause of IT outages
The effects of an increasing number of outages of web-based service providers were felt in New Zealand recently when hosted software provider Xero was forced offline for 45 minutes after datacentres at RackSpace, which hosts Xero's data, failed on June 30, causing a 45-minute outage for Xero customers.
The Rackspace incident is far from the only case of a service provider going down in recent months. Based on news reports, the number of such incidents appears to have been increasing lately, analysts say. They cited shutdowns of the Google Apps software hosted by Google, a major outage at PayPal earlier this month and a distributed denial-of-service attack on Twitter, as well as the Rackspace datacentre incident.