Amazon AWS and MS BPOS Ireland outage
Amazon AWS and Microsoft BPOS are experiencing major downtime on their Ireland sites. By now it is almost over and most of the service is up and running again according to the status report you can see here: AWS Service Health Dashboard. The reason to this outage was a lightning strike hiting a transformer. I have been in the IT services, datacenter and hosting business well over 10 years and my experience is:
- If you are an IT service provider and have an incident then the most important thing is to inform your customers. Sometimes it is even more important to focus on communication than to fixing the problem.
- By moving servers to hosting providers, centralized datacenters and even to the cloud-provider we concentrate risk and if something major goes wrong then more systems are affected. But this does not mean that moving to hosting or cloud provider means more downtime. Actually the opposite is true. The difference is that if Amazon or my employer Elion for example has an outage then it is all big news and everybody talks about it. If a mailserver of a company with 100 employees is down for 10 days every quarter then this will never make it to the headlines of newspapers.
By the way, does this incident reveal that Amazon and Microsoft host AWS and BPOS in the same datacenter facility? :-)
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