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Lightning Strike Triggers Amazon EC2 Outage
Some customers of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service were offline for more than four hours Wednesday night after an electrical storm damaged power equipment at one of the company’s data centers. The problems began at about 6:30 pm Pacific time, and most affected customers were back online by 11 p.m., according to Amazon’s status dashboard. The company said the outage was limited to customers in one of Amazon’s four availability zones in the U.S.
“A lightning storm caused damage to a single Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in a single Availability Zone, the company reported. “While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances on those racks are down. We have technicians on site, and we are working to replace the affected PDU.”
EC2 previously experienced extended outages in February 2008 and October 2007.
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.
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Forgive me if this redundant, i cannot for the life of me remeber whether i alreasy commented on this.
here is a story with an Amazon spokeman that confirms the course of events:
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Posted September 29th, 2010[...] happens when your servers go offline for an extended period of time – remember last year when lightening hit one of Amazon’s data centers and some clients were down for four hours? You get a credit on your invoice for the following month [...]
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Posted August 1st, 2011[...] In the past year there have been many Cloud outages: RackSpace Cloud, Azure, Amazon EC2, Salesforce.com, Google, Sidekick, PayPal, and Twitter all had well publicized outages. How elastic [...]
RESOURCE LINKS:
Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI
How Storage is Shaping The Cloud Data Center
Bringing Colo to the Customer: Modular Gets Local
Microsoft’s $1 Billion Data Center
June 11th, 2009