Monday, August 8, 2011

Amazon, Microsoft Clouds Hit By Lighting In Europe

Both Amazon and Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure were impacted over the weekend in Europe, after lightning strikes impacted a data center in Dublin, Ireland. Both Amazon and Microsoft reported users saw downtime for several hours after a lightning strike hit a transformer from a utility power provider in Dublin, sparking an explosion and. Amazon said, in its status update for Amazon EC2, that despite systems designed to transition to backup generators, the electric deviation caused by the explosion instead disabled the phase control system controlling its backup power plant, disabling them. It apparently took almost 3 hours for manual control and recovery to begin at Amazon. Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) also was down for at least four hours.