Amazon's cloud crash

A section of Amazon’s cloud computing offering, Amazon Web Service, suffered a brief outage yesterday, with a break in service to parts of America’s East Coast shutting down a number of popular sites including Netflix, Reddit and Foursquare.

European services were also disrupted around the same time due to a lightning strike at a Dublin data center.

Amazon managed to restore service within half an hour, but the incident reminded many users of the company’s April disaster, which lasted for two days and for which Amazon was forced to apologise.

Many Twitter users took the latest outage as an excuse to question the wisdom of businesses migrating services to the cloud.

Comments included, ‘Never trust your entire business to the cloud’ and ‘Amazon EC-2 US East: also downgraded by S & P’, a reference to the recent downgrading of the US credit rating by analysts Standard & Poors.