Amazon's S3 storage service down for several hours
Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning,
leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.
As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved,
according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's
issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote
Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.
She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly
happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.
Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly
retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.
A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service
was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent
of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating
with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing
additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a
statement.
Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained
on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when
it would be fixed. One suggested
that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web
services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their
end.
Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses.
"It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote.
"We desperately need an update... it's a huge hit on our reputation."
Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.
Gustavo,
a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a
large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems
because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with
Amazon because of its reliability."
Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that
guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level,
the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
IDG News Service
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses
By Markus Jakobsson, Zulfikar Ramzan
Published Apr 6, 2008 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Symantec Press series.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures
By Peter Thermos, Ari Takanen
Published Aug 1, 2007 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
