Print
If you need reliable, enterprise-class hosting, Amazon's EC2 servers can't be beat, right? Yesterday we would have said yes, but today things are looking a little grim. Amazon' EC2 cloud crashed overnight, and it still isn't operational as the time of this posting.
The outage is hitting a plethora of web startups that were trusting Amazon's much hyped cloud servers. Sites like Reddit, Quora, and Foursquare have been taken down. Even the Cydia iOS jailbreak app store has been affected. The outage started with just the EC2 servers, but has since spread to several other Amazon cloud servers.
Work continues on Amazon's end with a full restoration of services expected in the next several hours, according to the company. Server outages can happen to anyone, but a cloud-based solution like Amazon's can take out a huge number of sites when things go wrong. Will there be an repercussions from this prolonged outage?
Comments are closed on this article
bling581
April 22, 2011 at 9:50am
I'm tired of all the cloud computing hype and the people that proclaim it's the next generation of computing blah blah blah. This goes to show that it's not all what they make it out to be and that if you store all your data in the cloud or use a remote computer that you're at the mercy of the company providing the service. Should they get hacked, spamed, or have an outage then you're screwed.
reutnes
April 21, 2011 at 8:34pm
I'm going into reddit withdrawal. My productivity has never been higher.
Danthrax66
April 21, 2011 at 6:35pm
This isn't a failure of cloud computing this a failure due to lack of redundancy. Oh and by the way websites/servers are all "cloud based." Cloud computing for websites and other forms of servers is normal, Google's OS is a truly cloud based service which is different from hosting website at a datacenter. Amazon is just your average datacenter that have been around forever.
Hamburger
April 21, 2011 at 5:17pm
Ah the wonderful dangers of cloud computing. This news made me remember the last big cloud computing FAIL... T-Mobile's sidekick phone users were once effected by a cloud computing epic failure...
