Amazon's cloud crash takes down Foursquare, Reddit and others

April 21, 2011 9:53 AM
Dean Takahashi
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Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service crashed overnight, taking down a bunch of key web sites. Affected sites included Foursquare, Reddit, Cydia, Discovr and Scvngr.

Amazon’s Elastic Cloud is a huge collection of computing power in web-connected data centers. It hosts the web sites of a bunch of businesses and is the backbone of the web services economy, making it cheap for startups to launch and scale up a web site without having to build their own data centers.

The outage that started last night showed the vulnerability of this model, even though Amazon has backup technology in place. No word just yet on what caused the outage and what services are back up and running. So far, it looks like Scvngr is down and Foursquare is pretty slow.

Amazon has been describing the situation in its updates, and AllThingsD has a description of the services that are down.

  • http://profiles.google.com/dane.kantner Dane Kantner

    foursquare isn't just “slow” it's actually… down. Their main site has a status message saying everything at amazon is back up, yet their site is down, and their mobile app won't let you log in still.

  • http://twitter.com/tmilewski Tom Milewski

    “The outage that started last night showed the vulnerability of this model”… any hosting model is this way. All it showed was how unprepared these companies – that built on-top of AWS – were. It should be noted that only one availability zone (AZ) had this issue. If companies didn't properly distribute across multiple AZ's then that's their fault. This isn't any different on any other host.No, this shouldn't have happened but this is in NO WAY unique to Amazon or the buzz-word known as the “cloud.”

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2KO3REZVYECY6HU3LKDSNWHZCA Girish

    If these had been on Microsoft's Azure platform, there is a promised SLA which Microsoft will stick to and bring it up back up near instantaneously.

  • BlueBlade

    That statement is absolutely wrong. We have servers on all availability zones in the East region and all of them were affected. We are in the process figuring out if we need to build out in the west region or build out a DC to mitigate this risk in the future.

  • http://www.myvouchercodes.co.uk/ online stores uk

    What a great mess! This is affecting more sites than what is listed here. I am guessing Hootsuite is on this server as well.

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