On Tuesday at 3.30am GMT, the second Amazon EC2 outage in as many days saw its customers once again asking questions of Amazon’s cloud platform. Fortunately for the many products that rely on the service, the incident was quickly resolved.
Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region experienced connectivity issues according to its status page and big name startups including Rapportive, Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite and Heroku were temporarily unavailable.
This wasn’t the first time an EC2 outage has left some of the web’s most popular startups grinding to a halt. Earlier this year, an outage that lasted almost 48 hours raised many questions about the the reliability of Amazon’s cloud services and was without question one of the the worst outages in cloud computing’s history.
Last weekend, Amazon’s EC2 cloud service in Europe was unavailable as a result of a lightning storm in Dublin, Ireland. It took just over 12 hours for the service to be completely restored.
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Outages are thankfully rare but in cases such as April’s, they’re an all too painful reminder of how important investment in preventative measures in this space is to the development of the cloud and consumer technology industry as a whole.
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