Car Hits Utility Pole, Takes Out EC2 Datacenter

1sockchuck writes "An Amazon cloud computing data center lost power Tuesday when a vehicle struck a nearby utility pole. When utility power was lost, a transfer switch in the data center failed to properly manage the shift to backup power. Amazon said a "small number" of EC2 customers lost service for about an hour, but the downtime followed three power outages last week at data centers supporting EC2 customers. Tuesday's incident is reminiscent of a 2007 outage at a Dallas data center when a truck crash took out a power transformer."

Comments

Farmville updates on Facebook stop

[kriston]

And, as a result, Farmville/Mafiawars updates on Facebook temporarily stop.
Nothing of value was lost.

It's failure on multiple levels

[GilliamOS]

Amazon for not load-testing their emergency backup power on a regular basis, not having more than one connection the power grid, and the power grid for not having redundancies. Our aging power grid is really beginning to show on so many levels that this is going to become a lot more common over the coming years.