Seattle, Wash. — Amazon Web Service’s cloud-computer service crashed briefly Monday, temporarily making a number of their websites, such as Netflix, unavailable.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia experienced connectivity issues that shut many of its services down for roughly 30 minutes. Although the technical glitch was resolved, this could reinforce some of the hesitancy companies have about relying on cloud computing. Earlier this year the company experienced a different outage that lasted longer than usual, leaving many without access to their websites.
Other companies affected by the outage include Quora, Reddit and Foursquare, which reported on its blog that their services were affected by the Amazon EC2 outage as well.
In a statement on its website, Amazon said: “Separately, and independent from the power issue in the affected availability zone, we’ve discovered an error in the EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots. During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process.”
Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/3v9zeq8 (PC World)
Photo by flickr user Jeff Attaway, used under Creative Commons license
