These are the most unreliable workplace applications

Tired of waiting for that so-called productivity app to reload? According to a survey by TRG Datacenters, Monday.com, Gmail, and Microsoft Teams saw the most service disruptions over the last year, followed by Slack, Outlook and Google Drive.

The study, which analyzed the performance of the 30 top work-related platforms, found that such outages had far-ranging impacts.

• Outlook logged the “longest major crashes,” lasting an average of five hours each.
• Gmail disruptions reached 1.8 billion users across the world—or more than 20% of the global population.

Those disconnects add up, as corporate America outsources critical internal functions to third-party applications. CIO Dive reported that as of May 2023, “the average desk worker uses 11 applications to complete their tasks, up from just six in 2019,” according to a survey of nearly 5,000 employees.

More study findings include:

• Monday.com, the cloud-based project management software, saw the most outages in the study: nearly once a month.
• Slack and Outlook both recorded five major outages in the last year, but TRG Datacenters found Slack’s disruptions had shorter durations and faster response times than the Microsoft suite.
• Google Drive’s four major crashes “affected over a billion people, 1/8th of the world population, for around 90 minutes on average,” according to TRG. The platform averages one major outage per quarter.
• Zoom saw four big crashes in the last year, with an average duration of 2.5 hours, affecting more than 300 million users globally.

As Tech Brew previously reported, a single outage can have financially devastating consequences for platform customers.

In a recent study by Catchpoint, 43% of surveyed businesses across the finance, e-commerce, cloud, and healthcare sectors estimated they lost “more than $1 million due to internet outages or degradations in the month prior to the survey.”