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February 19 2008
Amazon S3 crash
Amazon’s S3 storage-as-a-service has a hiccup for a few hours
Amazon Simple Storage Service in the US aws.amazon.com lost a few hours of traffic due to an unexplained problem on Monday. The outage affected thousands of sites using Amazon’s storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2) services including high-profile mobile start up Twitter. Although it seems that the outage only affected US users and European users were unaffected
The response from an unnamed Amazon PR was
“For one of our services, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, one of our three geographic locations was unreachable for approximately two hours and was back to operating at over 99% of normal performance before 7 a.m. pst. We’ve been operating this service for two years and we’re proud of our uptime track record. Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect. We’ve been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it.”
While everyone has downtime the fact that this hit not just Amazon but thousands of internet sites that rely on Amazon as well is inexcusable. When the same thing happened to software-as-a-service CRM company Salesforce.com the bad-publicity dented their - until then - good reputation, however it also spurred them onto creating a site trust.salesforce.com that allows users to constantly monitor the Salesforce servers, which went a long way to mending the dent. According to some of the reports we’ve read the AWS forums turned “read-only” during the outage. Amazon claims AWS allows you to “Create scalable and reliable apps” Oops
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