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) [1] 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.
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.
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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/05/brief-outage-for-amazon-web-services/
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[1] Amazon (AMZN): http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/amazon-index.html
[2] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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