Brief Outage for Amazon Web Services

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.