Amazon and Microsoft both experience Cloud Outages in Ireland
Cloud services from both technology giants went down amidst lightning storms in Ireland yesterday.
According to Amazon’s service health dashboard, there are still issues in the Euro Zone Western region, although other zones are operating at normal availability.
After the outage, Amazon was forced to recover some block stoage servers manually. Amazon said this process required some capacity devoted towards other tasks to be used, thus hurting overall performance.
It said: “We anticipate that it will take 24 to 48 hours until the process is completed.”
Microsoft released a statement on the outage which read: “On Sunday, August 7, 2011, beginning at approximately 10:50AM PDT / 5:50PM UTC, a widespread power outage in Dublin caused connectivity issues for European BPOS customers.
“Services were restored to all customers by 5:45PM PDT/ 12:45AM UTC. Throughout the incident, we updated our customers regularly on the issue via our normal communication channels.”
All this being said, some experts were quick to chime in that this wasn’t a cloud issue, but a issue inherent in the infastructure of these two giants.
Riccado Degli Effetti, of Rackspace:
“It does not matter whether the computer hardware or software you use is located in your home or office, or miles away in the datacentre of a hosting company, things can still go wrong.
“That said, there are ways to protect datacentres from lightning strikes, such as installing lightning and surge protection.
“Both cloud and traditional managed hosting have to rely on well-maintained infrastructure to function,” he said.
He also had a thing or two to say about Amazon’s response to the crisis: “Customers rightly demand a high level of service and transparency when things do go wrong. It is no longer acceptable to post updates on a web site and not communicate directly or through multiple channels.
“Outages, although rare, are painful, and they should motivate cloud and hosting service providers to improve both preventive measures and the overall level of care provided to customers. As the saying goes, lightning never strikes twice, but Amazon has been hit before, in the US in 2009. It is important that lessons are learned from these events,” he added.
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