Zoho cloud apps hit with service disruption

Zoho web-hosted collaboration, communication, business and office productivity applications suffered performance problems and service disruptions for about three hours yesterday.

Packet loss on Zoho network access paths was first detected at around 9.30am US East Coast time, making Zoho's more than 25 applications partially or completely unavailable.

Zoho customers, mostly small and medium-size businesses, use its applications for a variety of critical business tasks, including email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, project management, CRM, data analysis and customer support.

Zoho said that by 12.30pm packet loss had been cut to "negligible levels" and that its applications should be accessible, but that it would continue to monitor its systems closely.

Outages, service disruptions and performance problems are one of the main areas of concern for IT managers whose companies use, or are considering using, cloud applications. IT staffers have little or no control over these incidents, and have no power to troubleshoot or mitigate the problems, but they still need to field complaints from their end users.