The collapse of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud Compute left several large websites out of commission on Thursday. Amazon reportedly attributed the problems to what it called “a networking event” that caused runaway re-mirroring of Elastic Block Storage volumes. The resulting cascade took down hundreds, possibly thousands, of websites, including Foursquare, Hootsuite, Quora and Reddit. Other details were left foggy. Although AWS has multiple regions and availability zones — a system designed to prevent a single point of failure — there was apparently an engineering flaw that allowed the mass outage to occur.
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Amazon's Cloudy Communications Make Bad Situation Worse
Posted by: Rob Spiegel April 22, 2011 01:25 PMThe collapse of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud Compute left several large websites out of commission on Thursday. Amazon reportedly attributed the problems to what it called “a networking event” that caused runaway re-mirroring of Elastic Block Storage volumes. The resulting cascade took down hundreds, possibly thousands, of websites, including Foursquare, Hootsuite, Quora and Reddit. Other details were left foggy. Although AWS has multiple regions and availability zones — a system designed to prevent a single point of failure — there was apparently an engineering flaw that allowed the mass outage to occur.