The following is an excerpt from JOHN LETZING | June 30, 2012 | WSJ.com |
Large electrical storms on the east coast disrupted power for Amazon.com Inc. cloud-computing operations Friday night, causing outages for customers such as Netflix Inc. and photo-sharing service Instagram.
The Seattle-based online retailer operates data centers with servers that manage the Web operations of many other companies, a practice often called cloud computing. Power outages caused by catastrophic storms that blanketed the east coast affected Amazon’s operations in Virginia.
On Saturday afternoon, Amazon was still reporting performance issues for what it calls its elastic cloud compute, relational database and elastic beanstalk services. The problems appeared to have begun appearing on the site at around 11:21 p.m. EDT on Friday.
At roughly the same time Friday, services such as Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest—customers of Amazon’s cloud services—began suffering disruptions.
Both Netflix and Pinterest appeared to be up and running as of Saturday morning, but Instagram was still experiencing issues.
Amazon said the storm had interrupted both its primary power service and backup generator power.
“We have restored service to most of our impacted customers and continue to work to restore service for our remaining impacted customers,” a company spokeswoman said. “We will share more details on this event in the coming days.”
Netflix, which transitioned to Amazon’s cloud service from its own data centers a few years ago, has had outage issues with the service in the past.
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