Amazon Cloud Outage Hits Social Startups

One of the Achilles heels associated with the Cloud reared its head today when the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) experienced a partial failure with one of its data centres in the United States, on Thursday morning.

A number of websites were affected by the failure, including the social news website Reddit, the Twitter toolbox Hootsuite, the Q&A website Quora, and the location-based social networking website Foursquare.

According to Amazon’s AWS status dashboard, the outage struck the EC2 service at Amazon’s northern Virginia site. This site handles AWS operations for the East Coast of America. The problems began at roughly 9.40am BST, with “latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.”

Cheap Option

All of these startups rely on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service, which has grown grown rapidly in Europe and the US thanks to its ability to provide SMBs with a relatively cheap way to get themselves online, and doesn’t require them to run their own infrastructure.

Last October for example, Amazon offered potential users the option to run a free Amazon EC2 instance for a year.

Of course the downside is that it makes these startups almost totally reliant on an outside provider to keep their services running. Last October Novell’s Director of Data Centre Management, Benjamin Grubin, warned that too much enterprise IT was simply not ready to be moved outside the perimeter, i.e. outside to public clouds. “Public clouds were going to take some amount of time to be mature. They weren’t there yet,” he said.

Other Failures

This is not the first time a failure has effected the Amazon Cloud. Back in May 2010, Amazon’s EC2 service suffered a power outage after one of its data centres failed to cope with a power switch-over following a car crash, which triggered a local blackout.

That failure occurred when a car reportedly crashed into a utility pole near one of Amazon’s data centres on the east coat of America. The Amazon data centre apparently went offline after a transfer switch failed to properly manage the move from utility power to the facility’s own generators. It resulted in some Amazon customers in its US East Region losing service for about an hour.

And previous in June 2009, one of Amazon’s data centres was struck by lightening.

Amazon UK did not respond to eWEEK Europe UK at the time of writing.