Thunder Storms take down Cloud Services like Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest

[garyopa]

Affected by the 'Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud'



Yes... Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services were taken offline for periods on June 29/30 due to a heat wave and thunderstorms affecting cloud computing services in the US...

That's right, an outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (aka Amazon EC2), took down major services like Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram -among others- during the last days of June.

Seems that the Amazon cloud service alone runs many major websites and is based over North Virginia, where there were severe weather conditions.

VentureBeat reports that heavy thunderstorms, powerful winds and torrential rains resulted in widespread power outages in the area, and at around 11.21pm EDT (4.21am BST) on June 29, Amazon Web Services reported: "We are investigating connectivity issues for a number of instances in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest subsequently tweeted that they were working on fixes for the outage shortly afterwards.

Services for Pinterest and Netflix were almost back to normal within 90 minutes, whereas Instagram remained down well into the next morning. Instagram appears to still have not returned to full functionality as of the time of writing, with users still experiencing problems with the service as of 6.30pm BST (1.30pm EDT).

Apparently, that was the second time in two weeks that the Amazon Cloud has failed.

The failure has led to many to speculate whether the companies will choose alternative services, or even abandon cloud computing altogether.

In any case, it's pretty weird to see all those major sites depend only on one Cloud service. Also, this proves that the risks of Cloud meltdowns are pretty much real.

NEWS SOURCE #1: Instagram Netflix Pinterest taken offline by severe storms in US (via) Digital Spy
NEWS SOURCE #2: Amazon outage Netflix Instagram Pinterest (via) VentureBeat

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news item!

[billysastard]

is there a storm brewing for cloud computing?

digital distribution fails when servers are turned off or go down, cloud distribution fails when there are storms, but games that we buy that are complete in physical form just carry on working unless they use some self crippling drm so why are companies (and parts of the press) so keen on telling us how much better these more expensive, less accountable and more unreliable services are? surely it cant simply be just about the vast profits they make by not giving us what we pay for??

[LKJHGFDSA]

The ironing is delicious.

[MadonnaProject]

lol more bursting of the cloud bubble?

[JonathanD]

lol more bursting of the cloud bubble?

I just don't understand how there was a bubble to start with....

Cloud computing makes sense for some situations, albeit very few situations but they do honestly exist.

Cloud gaming, not so much.