Amazon Cloud Outage Hits Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare

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Amazon Cloud Outage Hits Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare [news.cnet.com]

Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon's northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard.

[Leosghost]

Amazon are still suffering from a lightning strike on their cloud ( Oh the irony ;-) in Dublin at the week end ..which took it off line for much longer ( some of it still isn't back up ) ..putting all your data in the "cloud"... what could go wrong ?

[independent.ie...]

"Cloud"* is supposed to be safer because it is spread out and cloudy "instances"** can be "spun up"*** rapidly to replace each other if one goes down ..so there should be no down time ..

This is how it is sold ..

But in the real world ..;-)

It only works like that if there is another "instance" somewhere else, ready to go,( be "spun up"..****the jargon Amazon use ;-) that has been mirroring the first one in real time ..and there weren't any ..due to the costs involved of doing so.

And some ..Amazon, Microsoft , Google etc want everyone to keep their accounts and data bases in the "cloud"...and thus be rained on whenever Thor or a passing JCB throws a tantrum or doesn't look where they are going.

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Didn't you forget security and privacy, too!