In light of recent global outages, a study conducted by TRG Datacenters has identified the work-related services and platforms that experienced the most major crashes over the last 12 months.
The study analyzed 30 work-related platforms, considering data on the number of major global outages, the average duration of these outages, and the total number of affected users to calculate a reliability score for each service.
The focus was solely on major global outages where the platform was completely unavailable for all its functions.
Global Outages: Summary of the Findings
| Service | Major Crashes | Duration in Hours | Users | Reliability Score |
| Monday.com | 10 | 0.75 | 225,000 | 25.5 |
| Gmail | 6 | 3.5 | 1,800,000,000 | 55.0 |
| Microsoft Teams | 6 | 5 | 280,000,000 | 20.7 |
| Slack | 5 | 0.75 | 18,000,000 | 45.8 |
| Outlook | 5 | 5 | 400,000,000 | 26.7 |
| Google Drive | 4 | 1.5 | 1,000,000,000 | 61.7 |
| GitHub | 4 | 1.5 | 100,000,000 | 46.7 |
| ClickUp | 4 | 1.5 | 4,000,000 | 45.1 |
| Salesforce | 4 | 1.5 | 150,000 | 45.0 |
| Zoom | 4 | 2.5 | 300,000,000 | 44.0 |
| Notion | 4 | 2 | 30,000,000 | 42.5 |
Key Highlights
Monday.com was the platform with the most frequent outages, experiencing 10 major crashes last year — almost once every month. These outages lasted an average of 45 minutes and impacted 225,000 users, resulting in the lowest reliability score of 25.5.
Gmail and Microsoft Teams each experienced six major crashes, but the impact was largely different. Gmail’s crashes affected over 1.8 billion users, over 20% of the world’s population, with an average outage duration of 3.5 hours.
Microsoft Teams, however, had the longest outages in the study, with each lasting over five hours on average, affecting 280 million users. Despite this, Gmail maintained a higher reliability score of 55.0 compared to Microsoft Teams’ 20.7.
Slack and Outlook both had five crashes, but like Microsoft Teams, Outlook’s outages lasted an average of five hours, impacting 400 million users. In contrast, Slack’s crashes were much shorter — just 45 minutes on average — affecting a smaller user base of 18 million, leading to a significantly higher reliability score of 45.8.
Other platforms like Google Drive, GitHub, ClickUp, Salesforce, Zoom, and Notion each experienced four major outages over the last year. Google Drive, despite its widespread usage affecting over a billion users, managed to maintain the highest reliability score in the study at 61.7. The platform’s outages were shorter, averaging 1.5 hours.
Zoom had longer outages, averaging 2.5 hours, impacting 300 million users, resulting in a reliability score of 44. Notion‘s outages were slightly shorter, averaging 2 hours and affecting 30 million users, earning it a reliability score of 42.5.
A spokesperson for TRG Datacenters commented on the importance of these findings:
“The reliability of a platform is easy to maintain when the user base is relatively small. However, the game changes when a single mistake can affect millions or even billions of users, even if the downtime is as short as 30 minutes. Reliability becomes crucial when enterprises depend on these platforms to deliver results. It’s also important to consider that these platforms serve users across different time zones, so not all users may be impacted equally by an outage.”
This study revealed the challenges faced by widely used platforms in maintaining reliable services, especially as their user bases grow. Both businesses and individuals continue to rely heavily on these platforms for daily operations, hence the importance of minimizing downtime and speedily addressing outages cannot be overstated.
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