Yahoo Mail and Verizon LTE Failure - The Great Train Robbery with a Chance of MeatBalls

Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety

Shakespeare, Henry IV, I II, 3

Today, Thursday April 28^th 2011AD is indeed another strange day in the Cloud. Yet another Cloud-Based Service, Yahoo Mail, and Telecom Provider Verizon LTE (Long Term Evolution) Data Network, are currently experiencing an Outage.

As a former Telecoms Technician, these Developments are indeed mercurially strange and curious!

So says the articles “Yahoo Mail Down and users cry foul”, published April 28, 2011 11:19 AM PDT by Jay Greene, CNET News - Digital Media with Colleen Taylor from GigaOM bringing the “backative” as stated in the article  “Yahoo Mail Outage: Is This Thing On?”, published April 28, 2011, 11:19am PT by Colleen Taylor, GigaOM.

Truly, the five 9’s i.e. 99.999 is going to be very hard to achieve, as customers are not as tolerant of Data Network Failures such as the current Telecom Provider Verizon LTE (Long Term Evolution) Network Failure as stated in the article “Will Verizon's LTE outage Harm the "Most Reliable" Network?”, published April 28, 2011, 9:22am PT by Kevin C. Tofel, GigaOM as they are of Voice Network failures.

And as is expected in our world so intertwined with Social Networking, most people know about it because of complaints on Twitter. Even though it only affects only 0.5% of Yahoo Global user base, a mere one million three hundred thousand (1,300,000) users!

Yahoo Mail is not chopped liver folks! And neither is Telecom Provider Verizon. Albeit Faith in Cloud-Based Services is still strong!

Despite the screwed up look from Generation Y [aged 13 to 27] who ask, “like dude, who uses email anyway when you have FB?”, Yahoo Mail is still a force to be reckoned with in the email world, having ceded pole position to Google a long time ago in terms of unique website traffic to settle for third place.

Yahoo Mail now joins the who-who of Cloud-Based Services that have been experiencing outages since the Great AWS (Amazon Web Service) Cloud Failure of 2011 as chronicled in the article ‘Yahoo Mail down for some: The outage parade continues”, published April 28, 2011, 11:41am PD by Larry Dignan, ZDNET.

Albeit this seriously pales in comparison to The Great Train Robbery (1979) that was the seventy seven million (77,000,000) strong Sony PSN (PlayStation Network) Credit Card hack as chronicled in my blog article entitled “AWC Fail, PSN Hack and Nokia Layoff - Murphy Law in a Clash of The Titans”, it does raise concerns about security in the Cloud.

Especially as a Cloud-based Platform means that effectively all your personal Data is stored on Servers run by supposedly secure Servers on a set of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks) Mechanical Hard-Drives, Hybrid Mechanical Hard-Drives or SSD (Solid State Drives) is easily accessible to hackers.

So the faith of Americans is shaken yet again, as the Season of the Witch of Dark Skies continues in the Gloomy Cloud World.

Still, the march towards the Cloud-Based applications presses on, despite these Outages and Security Breaches, with Enterprise and Corporate Servers still placing their faith in Servers running Linux Distribution OS as stated in the article “Big Business backs Linux”, published December 1, 2010, 12:36pm PST by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet - Linux and Open Source.

Aside from this minor Yahoo Mail Cloud-Based Service Failure as well as the major Telecom Provider Verizon LTE Data Failure, will there be more Cloud Failures on the Horizon, possibly large food chunks falling out of the sky this time, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) Style? Stay tuned………..