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Amazon Cloud Computing Platform Goes Down, Takes Major Social Websites With It

by Robert Quigley | 9:06 am, April 21st, 2011

Amazon’s elastic compute cloud (EC2) is a popular hosting platform for social websites because it provides a cheap, scaleable, generally reliable place for them to live online without having to purchase a floor full of their own servers. But a major EC2 outage today highlights the potential perils of outsourcing one’s own hosting needs onto the cloud: When the cloud goes down, there’s not all that much you can do.

Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Heroku, and Hootsuite were among the services hit with major downtimes as a result of the EC2 failure, some of which, according to Amazon’s status page, appears to be localized at Amazon’s North Virginia data center. (As of posting, Foursquare and Heroku are back up, and the other three are still down.) While deploying one’s infrastructure across multiple Amazon web services availability zones can sometimes safeguard against local failures, multiple availability zones have been affected; Reddit admin Jeremy Edberg says that Reddit was deployed across three availability zones.

Amazon advertises an uptime of 99.95% for EC2; this means that an outage of four hours and twenty-two minutes would eat up a whole year’s downtime allowance, and this problem has been going on for at least four hours. Amazon does offer service credits to customers whose sites have been down for more than 0.05% of the time, so it’s possible that some of the social sites mentioned will at least be eligible for a discount of up to 10% for their pains.

(h/t TechCrunch)

  • http://twitter.com/bhelsloot Berry Helsloot

    http://mobypicture.com/ is down too. We’re trying to move to a different availability zone.

  • Anonymous

    Wow! That’s wonderful. Can someone at Amazon EC2 also take down Facebook, MySpace and Twitter permanently? Then we’d maybe be able to get back to more intelligent conversations on the web.

  • MasonicTV

    don’t forget PSN has been down all morning as well =(

  • http://thinkoutsidethebubble.net pstehlik

    We are planning the ‘T1000 Gathering’ to start a discussion about how to prevent these large scale failures in the future and how to minimize their impact on the whole ecosystem.

    The meetup ( http://bit.ly/feYcuC ) is on May 9th at 5pm in San Francisco followed by a screening of Terminator in the evening.

    I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas!!

  • bob bobberson

    “Amazon’s elastic compute cloud (EC2) is a popular hosting platform for social websites because it provides a cheap, scaleable, generally reliable place for them to live online”

    cheap?
    ^_-

  • http://twitter.com/muthuka Muthu Arumugam

    http://www.mtiks.com is down too…

  • Greekgod

    Cartown on facebook is down and several Zynga games aswell.

  • http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/ online stores uk

    What a great mess! This is affecting more sites than what is listed here. I am guessing Hootsuite is on this server as well.

  • http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/ online stores uk

    What a great mess! This is affecting more sites than what is listed here. I am guessing Hootsuite is on this server as well.

  • http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/ online stores uk

    What a great mess! This is affecting more sites than what is listed here. I am guessing Hootsuite is on this server as well.


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