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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Amazons-C ... 49185.html

Amazon's Cloud Crashed Overnight, And Brought Several Other Companies Down Too

Arik Hesseldahl, On Thursday April 21, 2011, 8:17 am EDT

The Amazon Web Services status dashboard is reporting an ongoing failure of its EC2 service on its servers based in Northern Virgina. Foursquare, Quora, and Reddit are reported to have been affected. I’ve got a call in to Amazon asking what happened and will update this post as more information becomes available.

A failure in the cloud is of course one of the fundamental problems that its critiques always point to. Yes you can save money and time and effort by farming your IT services and infrastructure out to someone else. But when those services crash unexpectedly, you, and scores of others that rely on the same infrastructure, are left to wonder what’s going on and when it’s going to be fixed.

As of now it seems like Amazon is getting the situation under control, but there will certainly be calls for a thorough explanation.

Amazon’s status messages are below.

1:41 AM PDT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

2:18 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution.

2:49 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution.

3:20 AM PDT Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. We’re continuing to work towards full resolution.

4:09 AM PDT EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT

5:02 AM PDT Latency has recovered for a portion of the impacted EBS volumes. We are continuing to work to resolve the remaining issues with EBS volume latency and error rates in a single Availability Zone

Makes me wonder what the next solution beyond the cloud will be...