TechJournal

Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage this morning.  Basically their whole file storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2) services went down taking with them every site that relied on those services.  Many startups were affected including Twitter, Adaptive Blue, 37Signals, Center Networks, etc.

The outage lasted for a couple of hours which made companies lose thousands to millions of dollars.  Some startups may not have lost money but a lot of data went unavailable including Twitter which uses AWS's S3 service for their static file hosting.  Good thing is Twitter only lost user avatars but theri messaging service continued.  Of course, many other sites had no access to their data stored on AWS.

The hardest hit of course were the web services using AWS's cloud computing services (EC2).  EC2 must be highly reliable that it should only crash if the world was falling apart.  However, AWS's EC2 has proven today that they bogged down without the world falling apart.

Amazon claims that the problems had been fixed.  But Amazon's reputation would surely take a while to heal.

Would you like to comment?
Join tj.com , or sign in if you are already a member
.