Cloudbusters

Pinterest, Foursquare, Reddit affected by latest Amazon Cloud Outage

October 23, 2012 , 0 Frank Gurnee

Monday was a tough day for some popular web destinations. Websites across the Internet were affected by what seems to be a growing trend of outages from Amazon Web Services. The cloud giant hosts some of the most visited and well known sites, and experienced an outage that lasted most of the afternoon on Monday during peak business hours.

Sites like Foursquare, Reddit, Pinterest, and many others were affected. Users began noticing a problem around 1:00pm ET though the official outage time from Amazon had it starting an hour later at 2:11pm EST. This is when Amazon engineers found an issue with servers in the Northern Virginia Data Center.

The recent outage joins a growing list of high profile cloud outages that are affecting businesses and costing company’s big money. In July, Amazon experienced a major outage that saw many companies jump ship for other providers. Godaddy was recently affected by an all day outage that affected a large number of websites, and Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud solution has had its fair share of outages.

The growing number of outages should have companies questioning whether low cost cloud hosting is worth it in the long run. Redundancy and failover plans are important when running a cloud service. Hardware failures and weather related issues can happen at any time; so minimal outages, upgrades, and maintenance periods should be expected occurrences. But when outages last hours or even days, the affects for businesses can be lasting.

It is important to research a potential cloud company’s failover, redundancy, and outage plans prior to making a decision on a cloud-hosting vendor. Though price will always be a factor when looking at a provider it may be policy that becomes a more important factor. Many vendors can have a guaranteed uptime, but that may just mean that they will reimburse for downtime, not that they have redundant data centers or failover policies. Outages are a part of the cloud, but it’s how an outage is handled that should help companies moving to the cloud determine their vendors.