Amazon’s EC2 (cloud computing) and S3 (storage services) had a major outage yesterday (2/15/2008) that caused problems for several startup and social media sites, including Twitter, Tumblr and AdaptiveBlue. Despite earlier reports, SmugMug was not affected by the S3 outage.

“First I knew about it was reporters emailing and calling me asking if we were knocked out by it. I wasn’t going to blog about it until I understood why we weren’t affected, but I’m really getting inundated with requests now, so I figured this would be a good way to optimize my time rather than spending all day on the phone.” Don MacAskill – Smug Mug

"The problem is with our storage provider (sic Amazon), and seems to fairly widespread. They assure us that they are hard at work making sure everything will be running smoothly again as soon as possible." Andy - AdaptiveBlue

Luckily the outage didn’t affect Twitter’s messaging services as Twitter only uses Amazon web services to store images. Tumblr visitors may have also noticed the lack of graphics on pages yesterday. The primary outage only lasted about two hours, there have been reports of ongoing intermittent issues with S3 and EC2.

"According to company spokesman Drew Herdener, one of the three geographic locations for S3 went AWOL around 4:30 or 5 a.m. Pacific and was unreachable for about two hours. “Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect,” said Herdener. “We’ve been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it.” - Good Morning Silicon Valley

As far as outages go, these things happen and are more widespread than you think. In the case of Amazon’s web services, the outage took out businesses that utilize the S3 and EC2 services as part of their business model. Amazon web services are a very cost effective means and for small companies and start-ups alike such services are the only way to go. Of course you never see Amazon in the news when their ECS 4 (e-commerce web  services - formerly AWS) services go down for an extended period of time.

"End of the world? Hardly. There's a big future in distributed storage and computing, and Amazon (AMZN) is on the leading edge. Nimble startups benefit any time they can focus more on building their companies than building their server infrastructure." Dan Frommer- Silicon Valley Insider

If your business model revolves mainly around web services you can expect outages to occur, it is part of doing business on the web. The old adage "don't put all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind when I hear about such things.

From what I can gather the sites that were affected by the outage are taking it in stride. The news media is making a mountain out of a molehill because it is Amazon.com.

I would love to read your comments on Amazon's web services outage!

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