Real-time visibility for a connected world

We are far from the days when learning about significant events in the world could wait until the next morning’s newspaper. The digitalization and hyperconnectivity we live in today require immediacy and comprehensive visibility of operations. 

Incidents like the recent system outages of companies like Meta, Comcast, and LinkedIn highlight the importance of having complete end-to-end service delivery visibility to accelerate response times and prevent costly errors. 

How does visibility help? 

You can’t improve what you don’t know, and given the growing need to continuously modernize systems and user experience, the ability to track and process information generated by customer interactions and front-end resource performance is vital. 

Continuous monitoring provides IT teams with the information to detect performance errors and address them promptly and effectively. The recent outages of several Meta, Comcast, and LinkedIn services are sufficient evidence of the importance of implementing effective monitoring systems that offer: 

• Faster responses, 
• Quicker problem resolution, and 
• Continuous monitoring. 

Meta, comcast, and LinkedIn in check 

Between March 5 and 6, 2024, these three companies experienced failures in their applications and services that temporarily disabled them. What happened? 

In Meta’s case, around 3:00 PM on March 5, users of several of its services (including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads) lost the ability to access their accounts due to a backend authentication issue. Almost two hours later, ThousandEyes confirmed a gradual return of Meta’s services, but it wasn’t until 7:25 PM that full recovery was achieved in all regions. 

For Comcast, the outage affected the accessibility of applications and services like Webex by Cisco, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with the latter initially being pointed out as the cause due to incomplete visibility of the problem. During the incident, Comcast reported a loss of up to 100% in traffic for the affected services and was unable to implement the emergency mechanisms it had. 

LinkedIn, on the other hand, experienced an outage of just over an hour during which users reported service issues. After analyzing the situation, ThousandEyes found no apparent errors in LinkedIn’s network, suggesting that the problem was in the service’s backend. Otherwise, it would likely have had to restart its key infrastructure to recover its operations. 

Observability insights for your company

In any of these three cases, recovery would not have been possible without the IT teams responsible for resolving the problem having complete end-to-end visibility of the situation. 

In cases like Comcast and LinkedIn, this solution could help identify the problem’s origin, while in Meta’s case, it was crucial for tracking the situation across affected regions. 

Protecting your operations has become vital, and tools like Ikusi Full Visibility with ThousandEyes help your teams diagnose, isolate, and assess errors more quickly and securely. 

Through continuous granular monitoring with one-minute intervals, ThousandEyes guarantees a complete view to identify failures quickly and easily, achieving faster response times and fewer operational difficulties. 

Don’t leave your systems unprotected; shield your operations with Ikusi and ThousandEyes.