Amazon suffers power outage - again

data centre last Thursday, briefly bringing down one availability zone in the US-EAST-1 region, Fierce CIO reports.

According to InformationWeek, some of the companies affected by the power outage include Heroku, Pinterest and Quora.

Though control over 99% of affected systems was returned to customers, it was at least seven hours before some services such as Heroku announced the complete restoration of access.

According to a root-cause analysis of the outage, the problem was said to have originated from a cable fault from a high-voltage utility power distribution system. Two utility substations went offline, causing a backup generator to take over.

Amazon has been criticised for its poor communication, but has corrected the behaviour in recent months, CMS Wire says.

On the same day as the outage, the company said it was offering all customers 24-hour access to customer support at no cost and lowering the price for some categories of premium support.

In addition, AWS added a system to monitor services and customer usage patterns, which it uses to send alerts to inform users how they can save money, improve performance or avoid security problems.

Tech Flash writes that, in a Saturday blog post, Amazon said: “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience to those who were impacted by the event.”

In April 2011, Amazon reported a similar cloud outage.