Severe Storms Take down Amazon, Pinterest, Instagram,and Netflix

BY EVAN THOMAS ANCHOR ANTHONY MARTINEZ Did you have trouble streaming Netflix yesterday? You weren’t the only one. Amazon’s EC2 cloud experienced outages yesterday in northern Virginia. Services including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram got knocked offline. The Next Web monitored the outages via Twitter and through Amazon’s status dashboard. The trouble reportedly started around 10:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and lasted about an hour. GigaOM reports — a whole bunch of clouds knocked out the cloud. Dominion Virginia Power provides electricity to many data centers in the state. The utility says a series of storms packing 80 mph winds damaged power infrastructure in the region. VentureBeat wonders — will this and other recent outages make cloud-based services start shopping around for something more reliable? “With the critical Amazon outage, which is the second this month, we wouldn’t be surprised if these popular services started looking at other options, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s just-introduced Compute Engine.” But a writer for Forbes asks — would simply migrating really fix the issue? If we want reliability, we have to build it in. “As tonight shows us, in many cases, the things we take for granted are all susceptible to the same negative outcome. Resiliency is part of our DNA. It needs to be part of the way we design our companies to recover from outages like the one tonight.” In the meantime, TechCrunch suggests we’ll survive. Somehow. “This service outage inevitably begs the question: If someone takes an iPhone pic of a Friday night artisanal beer, and it’s not posted on Instagram, does it make a sound?” Service was almost fully restored by Saturday morning. Amazon’s cloud dashboard indicates the company is still working out the last of the downtime issues in Virginia.