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Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really)

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the better-than-ball-lightning-in-the-cage dept.

The Register has details on a recent EC2 outage that is being blamed on a lightning strike that zapped a power distribution unit of the data center. The interruption only lasted around 6 hours, but the irony should last much longer. "While Amazon was correcting the problem, it told customers they had the option of launching new server instances to replace those that went down. But customers were also able to wait for their original instances to come back up after power was restored to the hardware in question."

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Apropos, sure. Irony, nah by dmomo · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Unless by Irony, you mean "like rain on your wedding day"

  2. It evidently did by grahamsz · · Score: 1, Redundant

    If i'm not mistaken then the whole point of a cloud is that you spread your processing around different hardware (in different geographies) and so that no part failing constitutes a total failure. Only one of Amazon's two zones went down so a well designed cloud app shouldn't have failed.

  3. Re:Who covers the cost? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Me. I pay taxes in the U.S.