Amazon’s elastic cloud, better known as EC2 is down again for the second time this year. For those who missed it, the king of the cloud went down in April of this year as well and for quite a long time. When a service touts 99% uptime it’s pretty easy to break that agreement from a single outage, add two outages and you’re in trouble.
Q4CUN6NSQMNQOne of the biggest issues with Amazon EC2 disappearing into the ether is that it takes some pretty big startups with it, innovators like Turntable.fm, Instagram, Quora, Fab, Foursquare, Heroku, the list goes on. Heck even companies like Netflix use Amazon EC2 and are impacted by outages like this.
When you’re running a startup, be it a wild success or still in the growing phase, having all systems go at all times is absolutely critical. Amazon was chosen as the right provider by all of these companies because of their guaranteed uptime, reliability, and come on, it’s Amazon, we all love them…right? You can see the latest Twitter stream below, one company seems to be back up however you can see major social media services like Foursquare are still down for the count:
One tweet I find a bit humorous is iFixit which says they are back up, and then thanks Amazon. Not sure now is the time to thank Amazon however I guess every hosting company deserves a second, er, third chance! Were you impacted by the EC2 outage? It’s times like these I’m glad I decided to go with Hostgator and Rackspace 🙂
