If Amazon.com wanted to pull a Mick and Keith and get everyone off of its cloud, it probably could have found a better way to do it.
Yesterday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that knocked client sites off the web for hours. Outages, according to several reports, began around 5 a.m. EST and continued for hours later. As of 5 p.m., according to a Bloomberg News report, Amazon claimed that customers in all but one time zone were back online.
Among those taking a hit were Foursquare, Formspring.me, Quora, Reddit and Salesforce.com. Another AWS customer BigDoor Media was not as lucky.
At 11:40 p.m. BigDoor had this message posted on its home page: "We're still experiencing issues due to the current AWS outage. Our publisher account site and API are recovering now, but apparently AWS thinks our corporate site is too awesome for you to see right now." (On the plus side for visitors, BigDoor had a YouTube video of a Honey Badger that was roughly equal parts profane, visually disturbing and funny.)
Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor, wrote on GeekWire, "Starting at 1:41 a.m. PST, Amazon's updates read as if they were written by their attorneys and accountants who were hedging against their stated SLA rather than being written by a tech guy trying to help another tech guy. We aren't just sitting around waiting for systems to recover. We are actively moving instances to areas within the AWS cloud that are actually functioning. If Amazon had been more forthcoming with what they are experiencing, we would have been able to restore our systems sooner."
Amazon's issues raise questions about the ability of cloud computing services to meet the needs of organizations both large and small. While there is much to recommend cloud services, the AWS outage highlights vulnerabilities, as well.
Vanessa Alvarez, an analyst at Forrester Research, told Bloomberg, "Customers need to start asking tough questions and not assume everything will be taken care of in the cloud, because it will not. They shouldn't be counting on a cloud service provider like Amazon to provide disaster recovery."
Michael Hussey, chief executive of the search company PeekYou, told Dow Jones Newswires that the company uses 12 Amazon servers but does not have applications that are "mission critical" on the cloud.
"The interesting thing about this outage is it took down massive sites, but we've been seeing problems all year long at this East Coast facility," Mr. Hussey said.
William Marler, a lawyer for the law firm Marler Clark, told Dow Jones, "It is simply amazing how dependent we have all become on the web -- that we do not control."
Matthew McKenzie on AllBusiness.com wrote, "Even a minor outage riles up the usual bunch of cloud-hating suspects. A major outage like this one whips them into a mouth-foaming, rug-chewing frenzy. They think this proves that cloud computing is unreliable and dangerous. As usual, they're wrong. ... Life will go on, and cloud computing will still be the safest and most efficient option, by far, for the vast majority of the businesses that use it."
- Amazon Web Services Disruption Knocks Customers' Sites Offline Across U.S. - Bloomberg News
- Amazon.com's real problem isn't the outage, it's the communication - GeekWire
- Amazon Cloud Service Suffers Errors, Hurting Websites - Dow Jones Newswires/The Wall Street Journal
- Amazon's Cloud Goes Dark & the Cloud-Haters Go Nuts - AllBusiness TechWatch
- Amazon And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day - AllThingsD
- The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (original narration by Randall) - YouTube