Wake up call from MS, Amazon outages

hosting services supplied by Amazon and Microsoft has highlighted the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity in the sector, reports One Stop Click.

Both Amazon's EC2 cloud service and Microsoft's BPOS desktop virtualisation suite were knocked offline after severe storms hit infrastructure in the country.

Manual recovery of servers led to delays in restoring connectivity and the fall-out was expected to continue for some time. A spokesperson for Amazon said: “We anticipate that it will take 24 hours to 48 hours until the process is completed.”

Fortunately, the bad weather did not block communications for the firm, which said: “Throughout the incident, we updated our customers regularly on the issue via our normal communication channels.”

In a message posted yesterday, Amazon explained: “The transient electric deviation caused by the explosion was large enough that it propagated to a portion of the phase control system that synchronizes the backup generator plant, disabling some of them,” states Tech Zone 360.

Although several Amazon sites were restored, others would take as many as 48 hours or more to come back in service, the report said.

According to Amazon's Service Health Dashboard, its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Relational Database Service hubs, for example, continue to have connectivity issues as of 10am Pacific Wednesday.