Amazon S3 outage causes outrage or hiccups in the cloud

We’re big on Amazon’s web services, and truly believe that the cloud is the new engine for all things computing. Having said that, a shadow of doubt was cast on the possibility that S3 may not be quite ready from prime time by a fairly lengthy outage this morning:

There are reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service - called S3 - suffered a “massive” outage this morning, beginning at about 7:30 am eastern time. At 9:03, an Amazon official posted a note in the service’s customer forum, saying, “We can confirm the high error rate you’re experiencing. While we don’t have an ETA at this point, we’re working as quickly as possible to restore performance. We’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.” A poster at Hacker News reports that the service is now “back up,” but another poster says that service remains “spotty.”The outage, which may have spread to other Amazon web services, appears to be affecting many web businesses, including prominent ones like Twitter, which uses the service to store the images that appear on its site. Writes one blogger: “Amazon S3 goes down … panic ensues.” But another S3 customer, also posting in the service’s forum, is more sanguine: “This is the first outage I have experienced since I joined the service nearly a year ago. Yes it sucks, yes I hope they get it fixed very soon… but, the sky is not in fact falling at the moment.” (from Rough Type)

This is the first widespread event for S3 that I am aware of. Since everything about S3 is new, and they are navigating an uncharted path, it’s fair to call this outage a major hiccup rather than a diasaster. The real measure of S3’s viability will be what is learned from the outage and how it is acted upon to insure that there will be fewer events in the future. Cloud computing is here to stay. Is S3 here to day as well? I hope so.

disclaimer: Amazon is a ThirdPipe advertiser, however we receive no compensation from Amazon for any mention favorable or otherwise. We earn no compensation for any referrals to Amazon Web Services or S3.