Amazon EC2 Outage Leaves Major Sites Down

Amazon’s EC2 cloud service experienced some major outages today taking down some major sites like FourSquare, Reddit, and HootSuite. While FourSquare seems to be back up and running HootSuite is still down for the count as you can see by the image below taken just minutes ago:

hootsuite_downAmazon commented about the outage on their AWS Service Health Dashboard today and I can tell you there are some engineers still sweating bullets trying to get things fixed. It wasn’t long before this story was picked-up on CNN today and I’m sure there are a ton of other sites that have been impacted that we still haven’t heard of. As someone that hosts over 160 sites I know how terrible an outage like this can be for businesses. Just when I was thinking of using Amazon for a hosting provider this event has definitely made me think twice.

This is just a reality of the hosting world and if a big dog like Amazon can bite the bullet it can really happen to anyone at any time. The only question in my mind is, why hasn’t it all been fixed yet?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton