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dticorp · Joined: 19 Aug 2006 Posts: 1760

Amazon failure takes down sites across Internet

NEW YORK (AP) -- Scores of websites and Internet services like Foursquare and Reddit crashed or had limited availability Thursday because of problems at a data center run by Amazon.com.

The problems revealed widespread reliance on Amazon Web Services, which rents out computers and data storage on a self-service basis over the Internet.

AWS is generally considered reliable because it uses vast numbers of computers, spread out in different data centers, making Thursday's failure unusual.

Amazon said the trouble started early in the morning at a data center in Northern Virginia, but provide no details.

The problems were ongoing Thursday afternoon.

Rest of the article here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Amazon-failure-takes-down-apf-2858263645.html?x=0

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elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

Update:

"Amazon's Cloudy Communications Make Bad Situation Worse"

The collapse of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Web Services' (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) left several large websites out of commission on Thursday.

Amazon reportedly attributed the problems to what it called "a networking event" that caused runaway re-mirroring of Elastic Block Storage volumes. The resulting cascade took down hundreds, possibly thousands, of websites, including Foursquare, Hootsuite, Quora and Reddit.

Other details were left foggy.

Although AWS has multiple regions and availability zones -- a system designed to prevent a single point of failure -- there was apparently an engineering flaw that allowed the mass outage to occur.

Most affected websites were up and running by Friday, but there was still a scattering of unresolved problems, according to news reports.

Amazon did not respond to the E-Commerce Times' request for comments by press time.

more.. link to news article

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

Update:

"Amazon still trying to fix computer problems"

Amazon.com is still trying to restore computers used by other websites as an outage stretched into a third day.

Besides selling books and DVDs, Amazon.com Inc. rents out space on computers that run other websites and online services. One of its data centers in Virginia began having problems on Thursday morning.

Amazon said Saturday that it is making progress fixing the problem, but more slowly than it had hoped. News-sharing site Reddit appeared to be functioning again. On its website, Amazon said it removed some bottlenecks that prevented connections from its Virginia center, but an additional issue was holding up restoring all remaining connections. The company's so-called "cloud' services in Northern California are operating normally.

No one knows for sure how many people have been inconvenienced, but the services affected are used by millions of people.

more.. link to news article

epath · Joined: 09 Aug 2010 Posts: 43

In addition to taking down the sites of dozens of high-profile companies for hours (and, in some cases, days), Amazon's huge EC2 cloud services crash permanently destroyed some data.

The data loss was apparently small relative to the total data stored, but anyone who runs a web site can immediately understand how terrifying a prospect any data loss is.

(And a small loss on a percentage basis for Amazon, obviously, could be catastrophic for some companies).

Amazon has yet to fully explain what happened when its mission-critical and supposedly bomb-proof systems crashed, but the explanation will be important. As will the explanation for how the company could have permanently destroyed some of its customers data.

In our experience, the "back-up" systems of most web-services providers leave a lot to be desired. The back-ups sound reassuring in theory--you are assured that your data is always "backed-up" on a system that is completely separate from the main one and that you'll be able to access it whenever you need it. But then, when you dig, you often discover that that means the data is simply copied to another file on the same box or another box in the same data room.

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elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

"Amazon Talks Preventing Future Outages, Says It’s Sorry"

Amazon has finally released a big statement regarding the recent server disruptions it experienced, which led to some sites having massive losses in service, and people to question the reliability of the cloud.

When I say that the statement is “big” I mean it. I will post a few choice snippets here. First, a quick summary at the beginning:

The issues affecting EC2 customers last week primarily involved a subset of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) volumes in a single Availability Zone within the US East Region that became unable to service read and write operations. In this document, we will refer to these as “stuck” volumes. This caused instances trying to use these affected volumes to also get “stuck” when they attempted to read or write to them. In order to restore these volumes and stabilize the EBS cluster in that Availability Zone, we disabled all control APIs (e.g. Create Volume, Attach Volume, Detach Volume, and Create Snapshot) for EBS in the affected Availability Zone for much of the duration of the event. For two periods during the first day of the issue, the degraded EBS cluster affected the EBS APIs and caused high error rates and latencies for EBS calls to these APIs across the entire US East Region. As with any complicated operational issue, this one was caused by several root causes interacting with one another and therefore gives us many opportunities to protect the service against any similar event reoccurring.

more.. link to news article

houstonexpat · Joined: 24 Feb 2011 Posts: 60 Location: USA

Sony Network, Amazon whats next.

Spread the risk, and don`t be reliant on anybody else for your business and income.