Amazon Cloud Goes Down Friday Night, Taking Netflix, Instagram And Pinterest With It

As of 11:21 PM EST Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia went down, due to severe thunder storms in the area. The Washington Post reports torrential rains, “scary winds and lightening” and massive power outages in the D.C. area.
Amazon EC2 runs many major websites and services. Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest have all been taken out of service during the outage. Half an hour later, in the midst of Friday night movie night, Netflix sent out the tweet above. Pinterest showed the following misleading alert, an hour an a half into the outage:


Here’s the play-by-play: At 11:21 PM EST, Amazon Web Services reported, ”We are investigating connectivity issues for a number of instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.” And at 11:31 EST, it added, ”We are investigating elevated errors rates for APIs in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, as well as connectivity issues to instances in a single availability zone.” By 11:49 EST, it reported that,  ”Power has been restored to the impacted Availability Zone and we are working to bring impacted instances and volumes back online.” But by 12:20 EST the outage continued, “We are continuing to work to bring the instances and volumes back online. In addition, EC2 and EBS APIs are currently experiencing elevated error rates.” At 12:54 AM EST, AWS reported that “EC2 and EBS APIs are once again operating normally. We are continuing to recover impacted instances and volumes.”
As of 1:15 am EST, Netflix appears to be back up and running, but Pinterest, Instagram and Heroku still appear to be down. It was just an hour-and-a-half during peak traffic time for these affected companies, but this event follows a six-and-a-half hour outage on EC2 two weeks ago. And one of the selling points of the Cloud is that there are redundancies to prevent just such occurrences. A small step backwards, perhaps, for cloud computing.