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Lightning strike brings outages for Amazon cloud

Lightning over Columbia river
Amazon.com has released a statement saying that the recent outages experienced on some of their Web services were due to lightning strikes in the United States. On 6:30pm Pacific Daylight Time, a lightning strike caused some of the servers to lose power. This led to disruption with their EC2 service for a limited number of customers.

Such an outage will once again raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing services. On one hand, such outages could have easily happened at any data center, even one locally owned by a small business. On the other hand, users of the services are still putting their data, sometimes of a sensitive nature, at the mercy of the service provider, something that makes some businesses uneasy.

EC2 is a service providing customers with access to Amazon servers using Xen virtualization, a free and open source virtual machine environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. This is not the first service disruption for Amazon’s offerings. Google’s services were also interrupted recently, leading some critics to step to the debate table for a fresh round of anti-cloud computing arguments. Undoubtedly the debate will rage on, and only time will tell how reliably the services can be.

Source: ZDNet Asia
Photo: Flickr

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