On Sunday, August 25, 2013, one of Amazon Cloud’s data centers experienced performance issues, causing Instagram and Vine to go down. The failure lasted almost an hour, affecting other sites as well: Netflix, Airbnb, and Audible.com also suffered, but with fewer issues.
The finger is being pointed at a Northern Virginia data center, which experienced a number of API (application programming interface) error rates.
Disgruntled clients flocked to Twitter the same way they did during the BlueHost outage earlier this month. However, it is Amazon that is suffering the loss: it is estimated that the company lost $1,100 each second in net sales.
CNET UK attributes the problem to a “glitch,” resulting from a lack of scalability. Although it is still unclear exactly what caused the outage, the takeaway lesson for Amazon Cloud should be a need for a disaster recovery plan and better redundancy. When comparing the BlueHost outage to Amazon Cloud’s recent flub, it’s easy to see that Amazon Cloud and their clients had a better plan regarding customer service, and a much better response time: BlueHost’s outage carried on for days, whereas Amazon Cloud’s only lasted an hour. Still, in webhosting, an hour is far too long for an outage to last. Fortunately Amazon Cloud has many data centers, meaning that problems with one only causes issues for a few of its clients.
Fibernet Corp is happy to report that an outage of this magnitude has never occurred in its well-secured data center. Thanks to precautions and multiple redundancies beyond industry standards, Fibernet can guarantee its customers 99.999% reliability and uptime.
Sources:
Whittacker, Zack. “Amazon Web Services suffers outage, takes down Vine, Instagram, others with it.” http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-suffers-outage-takes-down-vine-instagram-flipboard-with-it-7000019842/. (26 August 2013).
Velazco, Chris. “AWS Server Issues Take Down Instagram, Vine, Airbnb And IFTTT.” http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/instagram-vine-and-ifttt-went-dark-thanks-to-amazon-web-services-issues/. (26 August 2013).
Svetlik, Joe. “Amazon glitch brings down Instagram, Vine and Netflix.” http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/amazon-glitch-brings-down-instagram-vine-and-netflix-50012083/. (26 August 2013).