Amazon Suffers Back-to-Back Outages

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A day after a lightning strike took down primary and secondary power supplies at Amazon's data center hub in Dublin, Ireland, the company's EC2 cloud computing service experienced a brief outage. The crash affected websites like Foursquare, Netflix, Quora and Reddit. While not nearly as severe as the outage that occurred last April, both instances were similar, according to CRN.

InformationWeek explores what options cloud customers could take to be prepared for unusual outages like what took place in Dublin. Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGuard Availbility Services, a disaster recovery specialist firm, said extraordinary measures would have to have been taken prior to the incident for organizations to have protected themselves.

Despite the recent outages, customers appear not to be swayed, says The Wall Street Journal. Confidence in Amazon remains bullish and largely reinforces the message that companies using cloud services need to have redundancy plans in place.