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Cloud Watch: Amazon Explains Its OutageCloud Watch: Amazon Explains Its Outage

The aftermath of the day Amazon's lights went out; more clues about Apple's theoretical cloud service

Craig Matsumoto

May 2, 2011

3 Min Read
Cloud Watch: Amazon Explains Its Outage

Just in time for Interop, Amazon Web Services Inc. reminds us of the downside of the cloud.

  • On Friday, Amazon explained the pre-Easter cloud outage that took down several Web services -- not just Foursquare, but things that are actually useful, too.

    It seems the problem was a configuration error that made Amazon's machines think an enormous number of disk drives had failed. A big recovery job started, paralyzing Amazon's Elastic Block Storage. On All Things D, Arik Hesseldahl described it as "a human-caused mistake that was then exacerbated by the way the cloud system was designed to work."

About the Author(s)

Craig Matsumoto

Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

Yes, THAT Craig Matsumoto – who used to be at Light Reading from 2002 until 2013 and then went away and did other stuff and now HE'S BACK! As Editor-in-Chief. Go Craig!!

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