Brief Outage for Amazon Web Services

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Brief Outage for Amazon Web Services

Brief Outage for Amazon Web Services
- By: Rich Miller
  June 5th, 2008
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Some web services on Amazon’s utility computing platform were briefly disrupted Wednesday afternoon as severe weather caused a power outage near one of the company’s data center facilities. At 3:30 pm Eastern time, Amazon said it was “experiencing severe weather near one of our Amazon Web Services locations.” A half-hour later the company indicated that the data center had lost grid power, saying that “during the transition to backup generator power, we had a small number of EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone shut themselves down.” The instances were restarted quickly, the company said.

Amazon (AMZN) did not identify the location of the data center, but the outage occurred at roughly the same time that severe thunderstorms caused extensive damage in northern Virginia. Amazon has a large data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

joe

Posted June 6th, 2008

It wasn’t just shutdown of instances, some instances were lost irrecoverably. It’s weird that severe weather can destroy instances inside a datacenter. hope the rain wasn’t leaking into the racks.