Verizon Plans Two-Day Cloud Outage Over Weekend For Maintenance

Verizon Communications confirmed on Wednesday that it will take its public cloud offline for much of the coming weekend, but the telecom giant told CRN that only 10 percent of total cloud customers will be impacted and the outage might not last the full two days.

Verizon said the scheduled downtime is to allow for a round of routine maintenance commencing at 1 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday.

"Updates of this nature typically require some system downtime, and we notified all potentially impacted customers in advance so they could plan accordingly," Kevin King, director of corporate communication at Verizon Enterprise, told CRN.

[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2014]

Many cloud watchers took to Twitter with less appreciation for the routine nature of the planned outage. They lambasted Verizon for needing two days for maintenance -- an eternity in cloud time. Comments ranged from "how is this acceptable?" to "Upcoming Verizon Cloud Downtime May Be Wakeup Call for Some" to "This was a real shocker."

Verizon Cloud launched near the end of 2013, offering compute and object storage services that expanded on the Enterprise Cloud products obtained through the acquisition of Terremark in 2011.

This weekend's maintenance will only affect Verizon Cloud production nodes, King said, adding partners and customers using Terremark's legacy platforms -- Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise Cloud Managed Edition and Enterprise Cloud Federal Edition -- won't lose service.

While Verizon warned its cloud users to prepare for two full days of downtime, the company expects the job to be completed sooner.

"We have informed clients to be prepared for the system to be down for up to 48 hours, although we do not anticipate the work taking that long," King told CRN.

Not all Verizon Cloud customers will be impacted, and the outage only touches "a very small portion of our cloud infrastructure," King said.

Several Twitter users noted the outage was a good reminder for cloud customers to better familiarize themselves with their SLAs.

PUBLISHED JAN. 7, 2015