Major Outage At the Amazon Web Services

ralphart writes "The Northern Virginia datacenter for Amazon Web Services appears to be having a major outage that affects EC2 services. The Amazon Forums are full of reports of problems. Latest update from the status page: 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."

Severe weather in Virginia likely the culprit

[stopacop]

Severe weather hit the area. They shutdown Surry Power Station in Surry County, Virginia after a tornado took the power out that powers the power station.

Re:Severe weather in Virginia likely the culprit

[getagrip]

I am in Northern Virginia. There is no power outage or severe weather here.

Re:No Way!

[0123456]

A major outage on most professional cloud setups means it is down for a few hours. A major outage at work means the full day. It is like saying driving my car is so much safer then flying because I never got into an accident.

Last time I remember a day-long outage at work was 1994, and that was because the license server failed so we couldn't run our own software (we couldn't recompile it to remove the DRM because the compiler also needed a license to run).

I seem to remember that the Mac guys at the company also had a long outage when they couldn't connect to one of their Mac servers, but eventually someone actually went to the server room and discovered that it had been stolen.

Back on topic, I just don't see all these day-long outages that apparenty seem to happen all the time in companies that haven't moved their servers to The Cloud(tm).

Re:Severe weather in Virginia likely the culprit

[Anonymous Coward]

First: Please look at a map. Surry County is east of Richmond on the way to VA Beach. An outage at Surry Power Station would not affect a data center over in Dulles, VA. That power station does not server this area at all.

Second: Read the news. Every comment above is wrong in one way or another. Here is a local news article about what happened down there, if you are curious:
http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-richmond/surry-power-station-under-repair-the-aftermath-of-tornado

You people know nothing, and you post crap without doing any research at all.

Re:6 weeks before the AWS summit 2011

[TooMuchToDo]

It's not short sighted at all. When someone else runs your gear, all you can do is sweat until they get things back online, and they can take their time under what's known as "commerically reasonable SLAs". When you own your own gear, your own colo, etc., how much effort you use to get back up and running is up to you.

"The Cloud" for mission critical businesses is a joke.

Re:Reddit is down because of this

[Richard_at_work]

Don't worry - Slashdot just did something similar. When I try and reply to comments through my accounts comments history page, its horribly horribly broken. Each attempt to click in the reply box loads a new comment further up in the comment tree, and scrolls the page to the newly loaded comment. Scroll back down, click in the box again and it loads anotehr comment and shunts me back up the page. It can get really fucking annoying when you are trying to reply to a comment thats quite a way down a long tree.

Re:Emergency Plan

[Anonymous Coward]

50km is not a far enough distance. I witnessed this first hand for the employer I worked for on the Gulf Coast during Katrina. That storm jacked up about 120 miles, took down our primary AND failover sites.