Why Amazon’s Servers went down…
As you may know Amazon’s cloud is down…well at least one section of their cloud based on the east coast of the United States. This has impacted some big websites like Reddit, Hootsuite, Foursquare, Tumblr, Quora. I noticed first thing this morning since I am an avid reader of Reddit, and I like to jump on hootsuite right after that. It’s fascinating to see how one outage in on one datacenter can take down such a large swathe of the social web. 
And the reason that happened is because Amazon has built up a reputation as having the most fail proof datacenter available. They have been commonly known in the industry as being “Digg Proof” as their servers have the ability to expand capacity and bandwidth as needed so if you are on Oprah and everyone decides to jump on your website Amazon will stretch out your bandwidth so your site doesn’t go down with the overabundance of server requests and you don’t lose out on web visitors and sales. This type of datacenter architecture in very important to Amazon as they are one of the largest online retailers and their bandwidth usage during the normal year is only a fraction of the bandwidth that they use during the holiday season. The irony of the situation is vivid. Seems as of this post some of the more important websites that were affected by the outage have been restored.
Amazon has been tight lipped about their datacenter issues as they most likely don’t want to shed light on their vulnerabilities and give a leg up to the competition offering competing services. But it basically boils down to human error…check out their official statement below…
Just a short note to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck trying to add capacity to the affected Availability Zone to re-mirror stuck volumes. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated to add capacity to this fleet. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.
Tags // Amazon Cloud, Hosting, IT, Server