A systems failure at Amazon's S3 hosted storage service this morning has affected a host of Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter and SumgMug, which are dependent on it for the delivery of their applications.
At 9:05AM PDT on Sunday (AEST 2.05 AM Monday) Amazon issued an outage report, claiming it was experiencing "elevated error rates with S3". According to Amazon, the outage affected sites in the US and EU.
As a consequence, a variety of businesses such as Twitter, digital photo sharing Web site, SmugMug and The Huffington Post all had issues. Twitterers were claiming their avatar images could not be displayed. The Huffington Post was also unable to display images to its stories, while SmugMug could not offer any service at all.
"We're not happy about it, of course, but we are prepared for it and expect there to be no data loss or any long-term reduction in service," said a post to the SmugMug homepage earlier this morning.
Another of the sites to be affected was Jungle Disk, which provides data and file storage. Its tag line is: "Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3."
However, at 5:12 PM PDT (10.12 AM AEST) the S3 site was restored.
"We are confirming that service in both the US and EU has been fully restored. We appreciate your patience. We will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation."
Reprinted with permission from Computerworld Australia. Story copyright 2008 Computerworld Australia Inc. All rights reserved.
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Comments
Alot of their customers are pissed, many have left and have gone over to Nirvanix. Thats 2 outages in 6 months by S3, I have left S3 and moved over to the Nirvanix cloud, check them out: www.nirvanix.com
On the subject of file backup, sharing and storage ...
Online backup is becoming common these days. It is estimated that 70-75% of all PC's will be connected to online backup services with in the next decade.
Thousands of online backup companies exist, from one guy operating in his apartment to fortune 500 companies.
Choosing the best online backup company will be very confusing and difficult. One website I find very helpful in making a decision to pick an online backup company is:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies in its directory and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
I was an unsatisfied Amazon S3 online backup customer until recently. However, these problems have led me to defect to Angel Backup - http://www.angelbackup.com - as they run on their own proprietary platform which seems to be a lot more reliable.
Data is critical to my business, so a reliable backup system is a must.
Nirvanix has a far worse track record than S3. They are down all the time, but worst of all, they have lost files forcing one company out of business! Stay away!!!
The company MediaMax went out out of business because 25gb of free storage doesn't fly. Nirvanix was the first with and industry SLA, copied by Amazon. It has been met consistently. First with a 100% SLA option and an enterprise base to prove it.
Hi, Hamul - you're right.
Nirvanix has lost MILLIONS of user files! In fact, TheLinkup.com, which is the company that Nirvanix is spun out from, says that openly, and attributes that as being the reason they're no longer in business.
I am in the process of contacting current Nirvanix corporate customers and warning them about what happened. Mediamax didn't go under because of their poor business model - they went under because of the gross incompetence of their spin-off/subsidiary company Nirvanix. It was Nirvanix's terrible mistake that began the process, and I believe, will be repeated. Nirvanix is being run by the same people who deleted entire terabytes of customer data in an "engineering error" - watch out, it WILL happen again, and it won't be funny when it is your files.
This article can clear things up: http://www.blocksandfiles.co.uk/article/6176\
I just came across this on another post, Nirvanix clears the air about this Linkup mess, check it out here: http://developer.nirvanix.com/blogs/nirvanix/default.aspx
By the way: A commenter is going around leaving links to the official blog.
As you can see above, they've used MY name. They posted the SAME link on multiple other blogs, using at least 4 other names - Nick, Darren, Eric, and one other.
If you own a blog and you have commented on the whole Nirvanix/MM fiasco, watch out for shills spamming your site.
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