Verizon upgrade triggers 40-hour cloud service outage

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) said that its self-imposed shutdown of its cloud during the past weekend for maintenance will ensure that any future updates can take place without any impact on customers.

"The seamless upgrade functionality allows Verizon to conduct major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity," Verizon said in a release. "Traditionally, updates have been made via rolling maintenance and other methods. Many cloud vendors require customers to set up virtual machines in multiple zones or upgrade domains, which can increase the cost and complexity."

The service provider's cloud service was shut down for 48 hours for scheduled maintenance, which included an update to support the company's recently launched cloud marketplace and administrative tools that make VM management and resource monitoring easier.

Verizon said in a release that the update "was completed at 5 pm ET on January 11 and the new features take effect immediately for all Verizon Cloud customers."

On Jan. 5, the service provider told customers that it would take its cloud service offline to conduct scheduled maintenance.

Although these upgrades will provide benefits to cloud users that need to scale their service needs, customers will still have to have network backup plans. Wide reaching outages of Microsoft's Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Amazon's Web Services (AWS) (NASDAQ: AMZN) cloud services illustrated how bad code done during network updates can affect a cloud service.

For more:
- see the release
- TechWeek Europe has this article

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