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What is Twilio and what does it do
Twilio is a cloud communications company with headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Twilio provides APIs for voice, text, chat and video applications. They also offer faxing capabilities and other services including IP call routing. According to their website, “Twilio enables developers to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, record and transcribe phone calls, and establish video conferences.”
Deciding to use Twilio for your company’s communications needs is a complex process. There are several things you’ll need to consider, including device support, pricing and various technical aspects of the service.
I’m going to share with you a bit about what Twilio is and how you can use it in your apps today.
The service has been around since 2011, but only recently gained traction as a reliable platform for phone applications and voice apps. The API service was created by two engineers. They had a lot of success with it and they decided to keep working on it.
Here are a few things you should know about the service:
1. Twilio’s phone numbers have inbound caller ID. That means that anyone can call your number and the caller ID will display the information you have provided Twilio, including name and number.
2. Twilio’s service can send SMS and make outbound calls at the same time. A few competing services could only do one or the other.
The outage and its effects
On April 1, 2018 at 11:03 am PDT, Twilio experienced a major outage that caused an estimated 97.7% of their services to be rendered inoperable. This was the largest outage that they experienced since beginning operations in 2008. The outage lasted for 30 minutes and had a disproportionately large effect on the population of Twilio’s customers, most of whom deal with APIs at least occasionally. The most notable effect was the inability of Twilio customers to use this outage as an opportunity to demonstrate their technical acumen on social media channels.
Twilio’s response to the outage
Twilio was very apologetic about the outage, stating that it would be conducting an after-action report to ensure that a similar event does not happen in the future. In their words, “You told us during our brief outage your app stopped working. We will use this time to better understand how our customers’ apps behave with Twilio down.” They also stated that they would be “monthly reporting on the health of our APIs and services, including any outages” to better inform their customers of potential dangers.
Furthermore, they recommended that users of Twilio should take the actions of using Twilio’s status page to ensure themselves of whether or not the service is working. For example, before trying to send an SMS message, a user could check Twilio’s status page to see whether or not their account is working.
In addition to all this, Twilio also contacted developers who were affected by the outage and gave them $500 worth of pre-paid credit for their services.
All in all, Twilio’s response to the outage was quite impressive. Within 12 hours of the outage, Twilio had restored service almost completely, and within 24 hours the situation was resolved. Their post-outage actions have shown their commitment to becoming a major player in cloud communications.
What this means for businesses that rely on Twilio
When a service becomes overwhelmingly relied upon, this can cause it to become a target for hacks. For businesses that use Twilio, the outage was not at all pleasant. Since Twilio serves as the core of several businesses of all sizes, their outage can have catastrophic effects on these companies. For businesses that rely heavily on Twilio, it’s a good idea to consider their operations with the assumption that Twilio will have many outages in the future. The best way to prevent additional outages is to continue investing in alternatives such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which have proven themselves to be highly reliable technologies and should serve as your primary or secondary data storage solution.
Twilio outage and its effects on businesses
If you use Twilio, it’s a good idea to consider how you’re affected by their outages. If a company relies on Twilio and their services go down, this can have a disastrous effect on the core of their business. While there is no way for businesses to completely prevent outages from happening, there are ways to minimize the impact of the outage.
Twilio is often considered the backbone of many businesses. If a business gets hit with an outage, it can lead to catastrophic effects on the whole business. The best way to prevent this is by implementing your own backups and doing a periodical backup of your data so as to reduce the impact of future outages. It’s important to consider that individual businesses may not have the ability to solve their own problems, so it’s best to work together with other companies in order to minimize the effects of an outage. The best way to prevent outages is to ensure that you have a backup plan in place, so that your data can be restored to an earlier point when the outage happened.
The importance of working with other businesses
