Amazon Apologies for Cloud Crash, Issues Credits

Posted 04/29/2011 at 10:23am | by Paul Lilly

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Following the recent outage at its Web hosting business that brought down several websites, both big and small, Amazon today offered an apology to customers and a long winded technical explanation of what went wrong. Amazon also said it would be giving affected custoemrs a 10-day service credit equal to 100 percent of their usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances, and RDS database instances. The credit will be automatically applied to their next AWS bill, Amazon said.

"We want to apologize," Amazon said in a nearly 5,700 word blog post. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services."

If there's a silver lining to all this, it's that Amazon is taking the outage seriously rather trying to downplay the significance and/or sweep it all under the rug. In addition to an apology, technical explanation, 10-day credit, and a promise to fix what needs fixing, Amazon also vowed to improve its communication with customers.

"In addition to the technical insights and improvements that will result from this event, we also identified improvements that need to be made in our customer communications," Amazon said. "We would like our communications to be more frequent and contain more information. We understand that during an outage, customers want to know as many details as possible about what's going on, how long it will take to fix, and what we are doing so that it doesn't happen again."

Does Amazon's statement give you warm fuzzies, or is your confidence still shaken?

Image Credit: Flickr (Dave Keeshan)