With major outages impacting Gmail, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram recently, consumers are right to be concerned over the security of their private data. While details of these outages haven’t yet been published – a situation I sincerely hope Alphabet and Facebook correct – the implications of these outages are something we should be looking closely at.
The first, and most obvious, implication is the impact of data management during outages. Software developers tend to design their test suites around proper functionality – does the product or feature operate as expected. Negative testing or characterizing behaviors in the face of adversity may not be part of the test suites run during normal release cycles.
