The most-popular consumer apps also happen to be the least-reliable platforms.
Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Outlook had among the most major crashes over the last 12 months, according to a recent study by TRG Datacenters, which analyzed the top 30 work-related platforms and services.
Gmail’s six major outages affected 1.8 billion users worldwide, or about 20% of the world’s population.
Outlook, with five incidents, suffered the longest major crashes, with an average time of five hours. Its outages impacted 280 million people.
Salesforce Inc.’s Slack had five major crashes, but they were significantly shorter than Outlook. They also affected only 18 million users worldwide.
The work platform with the most crashes was Monday.com, with 10 over the last year. They lasted 45 minutes on average, affecting 225,000 users.
Google Drive, GitHub, ClickUp, Salesforce, Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Notion each endured four crashes over the last 12 months.
Google Drive’s major crashes affected over 1 billion people, for about 90 minutes on average. But they were two times shorter than Gmail.
“The reliability of a platform is easy to keep, when there are not that many users,” a spokesperson for TRG Datacenters said in a statement. “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.”
TRG’s report comes amid heightened interest in the reliability of technology as it interconnects everything in the digital economy and more people work from home.
Last month, a software update snafu by CrowdStrike Inc. led to calamitous results in the airline, banking, media and health care industries, impacting millions of people and causing up to $5 billion in damages. Since then, CrowdStrike, business partner Microsoft and customer Delta Air Lines have blamed one another for the global glitch.
