Amazon datacentres are back online after a long outage

ONLINE RETAILER AND WEB HOST Amazon has finally brought its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) datacentres back online after nearly a week long outage that caused major disruptions to websites around the globe.

The Amazon datacentres cut out last Thursday, taking websites like Reddit, Quora and Foursquare offline, but services have returned to normal just today, making it a difficult Easter weekend for many.

The majority of Amazon's datacentres in the US are back to normal operations, but two are still experiencing some difficulties in Northern Virginia. An EC2 datacentre is having problems with instance connectivity, latency and error rates, while an AWS datacentre is experiencing database instance connectivity and latency issues.

It's likely that the holiday weekend contributed to the slow pace with which Amazon brought its services back online, but that excuse will do little to calm the thousands of businesses that experienced downtime as a result, some of whom will have missed out on Easter sales.

Cloud management firm Rightscale said that Amazon's services are usually extremely reliable and that this has led many customers to become complacent about the possibility of service outages.

Rightscale criticised Amazon for failing to properly communicate about the outages, having taken 40 minutes to post its initial status update, and having not provided enough information for companies using its services to take action.

The downtime marks one of the most significant outages for cloud computing so far, but Rightscale still believes the cloud is a more reliable and safer bet than running traditional data centres, despite the potential for cloud outages to cause widespread chaos for many companies. µ