Typically the air is calm and quiet after a storm. The only noise in the background is the thunder’s rumble slowly fading away. The musky smell of rain fills the air as the rain clouds fade from the sky. For iCloud messaging, the sky remained a jumbled, cloudy mess after an outage left roughly 200 million users—2 percent of users —without e-mail access for 36 hours and after the outage, iCloud literally threw everyone’s emails back into their inboxes and attached an apology letter to the mess.

The users’ emails looked like a bowl of gumbo. The emails were in no order and many of them had the wrong dates. One person’s email even had the year 1969 tagged onto it. Since 1969 was a year that iCloud wasn’t even a figment of the imagination yet, the emails  were not accessible.

iCloud wasn’t the only one with an outage. Cloudflare joined the bandwagon as well. A lot of users found their sites were not available. The company acts as a firewall between users and servers like a knight with a shield that provides security for websites, so “bad traffic” doesn’t get anywhere near the protected websites. Unfortunately, if Cloudflare goes down, it’s pulling those websites underwater with it.

Interestingly enough, there was yet another outage. GoDaddy.com went down for six hours last week. A hacker took full credit for the site’s outage, saying that he released a distributed denial-of-service attack, but it was later confirmed that the site was not hacked.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables,” Scott Wagner, GoDaddy CEO said.

Is the IT apocalypse here? Is technology ending as we know it? Is it more likely companies need to pay more attention to detail and tighten up the systems?