Amazon Web Services outage takes down Reddit, Netflix, Pinterest

Shawn Knight

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Staff member

Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Monday that resulted in downtime for many popular web destinations and services. Issues began at a Northern Virginia data center that caused a chain reaction across the Internet spanning several hours.

It started out innocently enough as a few major websites and services like Github, Minecraft and Reddit were among the first affected. As the day progressed, more sites and services were added to the list. Before it was all said and done, Airbnb, FastCompany, Fliboard, FourSquare and Pinterest were all experiencing downtime.

Frustrated site owners and readers took to Twitter to voice their concerns and let people know what was going on.

Amazon hasn’t offered up an official explanation as of writing but a spokesperson did point out that the outage was not the result of a hacking attempt as claimed by Anonymous. Tera Randall from Amazon said the problems were limited to a single zone of the company’s service, thus only affecting customers in that zone.

reddit netflix flipboard amazon amazon cloud

A quick check of most services reveals business as usual but there’s no doubt that some are a bit concerned by the outage. After all, this isn’t the first time that Amazon Web Services have suffered massive outages.

A major storm knocked out a large chunk of Amazon’s EC2 service in July, resulting in downtime for Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest. Similar events took place in April 2011 that affected the Amazon EC2 service and Amazon RDS Service.

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[FONT=Arial]The mighty cloud. Once again we learn how these services are not all serving. When most of society finally moves all their content to the cloud and they can’t access it due to outages, failure to pay your cloud subscription or whatever the reason you finally see the risk of putting your personal and business interest in the hands of another.[/FONT]
 
Cloud services are a house of cards IMO - - it's the weakest link problem.
As AWS is the database component, when it is operational again, so will all the other Cloud services that depend upon it.
 
The outage also took down ESEA.net

This is just a reminder why I have multiple high volume hard drives in my computers. Screw keeping all of my data on some other peoples disks. Besides if I want to access it via my smartphone AT&T will just hit me with a huge data plan overage.
 
So, let me recap
if its sunny - good
if its raining - no good

what is the point to having something different to AOL
the point
.(make it bold plz)
 
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