In Pictures: Top 25 network and IT industry stories of 2012

Who turned off the cloud?

Widespread outages continued to raise questions about how trustworthy the cloud is, and whether companies can really afford to put mission critical data into it. Among the biggest outages this year: Amazon suffered a 12-hour cloud blackout it said was the result of a bug that cropped up after new hardware was installed in one of Amazon Web Service's Northern Virginia data centers. That outage brought down popular sites such as Reddit, Imgur, AirBNB and Salesforce.com's Heroku platform, according to Amazon. Microsoft (Azure), Google (Gmail), Apple (iCloud), Verizon Wireless and Salesforce.com were among other high profile cloud network and service operators that had to scramble in 2012 to fix their offerings and reassure customers that things would get better.