Okta

Okta was founded in 2009 with a specific thesis: enterprises were accumulating cloud applications faster than their IT teams could manage access to them, and a neutral, cloud-native identity provider that could serve as a central authentication hub was a genuinely valuable business. The founders, Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, both previously worked at Salesforce and brought an understanding of enterprise SaaS buying cycles that helped them navigate the slow-moving IT procurement process. Okta went public in 2017 and became the dominant independent identity provider, with the 2021 acquisition of Auth0 adding developer-focused identity capabilities to the enterprise-focused Okta core.

Okta's platform handles Single Sign-On for thousands of pre-built application integrations, multi-factor authentication through the Okta Verify app and TOTP, lifecycle management that provisions and deprovisions user access across connected applications, and the Okta Identity Engine that powers contextual authentication policies. Because Okta sits in the authentication path for every application it protects, an Okta outage does not just take down one application — it takes down every application in an organization's Okta tenant simultaneously. The blast radius of an Okta incident is uniquely wide among enterprise software categories.

The impact of Okta downtime is severe and well-understood by the enterprise IT community. Every SSO-protected application becomes inaccessible simultaneously — employees cannot log into Salesforce, Workday, GitHub, Slack, or any other integrated tool. MFA verification through Okta Verify stops working, blocking authentication even for applications using Okta as an MFA provider rather than full SSO. Lifecycle management provisioning — new hire access, offboarding removal — queues up but does not process during backend degradation. Okta's own admin console may be inaccessible, preventing IT administrators from investigating or making emergency changes during an active incident.

Outage.gg tracks Okta service status using community reports from IT administrators and enterprise users. If SSO is failing, MFA is broken, or Okta-protected applications are inaccessible, the live status page shows current impact from organizations across the Okta customer base.