Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite Go Down Due To Amazon EC2 Cloud Service Troubles

Amazon's affordable cloud-based EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Web hosting service has attracted many popular startups in the social media space, and technical issues this morning have taken down several popular services including Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby.

Amazon obviously has a huge online retail presence, but the company is also one of the world's leading cloud services providers -- startups are drawn to EC2's variable pricing model that lets them scale as they grow. Unfortunately, with these sites being hosted on a single service, a big outage has been able to take down a swath of the social Web.

Highlighting the double-edged sword of centralized cloud hosting, CNET writes that earlier this morning Quora's homepage noted, "We'll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We'd point fingers, but we wouldn't be where we are today without EC2."

Amazon says it's still working on the issue. According to its status dashboard, Amazon's North Virginia servers started experiencing problems at 1:41 AM, and it's still causing downtime issues at all of the sites. For the latest, check Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite.

Comments

[JackTheSkipper]

08:25 PM on 04/22/2011

The characters in the reddit logo looks similar to the characters in The Powerpuff Girls. I see a lawsuit on the way.

[SwingingFromCenter]

06:36 AM on 04/22/2011

And this is, was, and will continue to be the giant glaring problem with cloud services that IT people talk about all the time, but MBA's that think they know better than everyone else plug up their ears and refuse to listen to:

Single Point of Failure

The cloud is a great idea IN THEORY, but in practice, you've got to be willing to make some huge sacrifices in order to make that transition.  MBA's who adopt the philosophy of not needing to know what it is or what it does to know that it costs too much are always willing to do that to cut costs.  IT professionals know that it's just asking for trouble

[Ray Long]

04:50 AM on 04/22/2011

http://www.expedient.com/products/cloud-computing.php

Full disclosure: I work for Expedient.

It never hurts to get a quote or ask about our SLA's ;)

[Sam Palcko]

01:15 AM on 04/22/2011

Sites have to know what they are getting into when they use a service like this. On the one hand, yes, it is very inconvenient when a crash like this causes several sites to go out at the same time, but without a cheap and flexible server system, some of these sites would not even be able to afford to provide the content we all take for granted on a daily basis. It is this type of affordable accessible technology that is driving the information age today.

[Mister Grumpy]

08:54 PM on 04/21/2011

Try living in the real world....... not the Matrix..........

[deluxebrand]

07:20 PM on 04/21/2011

tout.com is down still

[lhanderson86]

07:11 PM on 04/21/2011

Don't put all your eggs in one...cloud.

[lostgenxer]

06:39 PM on 04/21/2011

F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 Mi Gusta 0.0

[Lahonda]

06:32 PM on 04/21/2011

The appropriate disaster recovery strategy would be to have two cloud environments up at the same time and synchronizing real time. We have backups on the Amazon EU cloud but cannot afford real time synch as yet. Amazon provides a top-notch product.

[ReligionTaints]

06:11 PM on 04/21/2011

Reddit>blueberrymuffins>Horse shit>Hp

[NoElephants]

06:00 PM on 04/21/2011

Dipity is down too :(

[dipity]

02:32 PM on 04/22/2011

Word from Amazon is that most service should be back up and running in 4-5 hours

[I-am-correct]

05:38 PM on 04/21/2011

We lost THOUSANDS of dollars in a launch today because of this. Ya just NEVER think it's gonna happen to you. This stuff happens to all servers.. just that the timing was bad. :(

[socialtalker]

06:26 PM on 04/21/2011

tim ferris of 4 hour workweek has a backup system for his sites where he can switch his site in 5 minutes if there is a breakdown.

[lackofoversight]

05:36 PM on 04/21/2011

Having ALL your stuff on some remote server somewhere, the cloud, always seemed iffy to me. What if the cloud ever went down? You'd have nothing and be helpless. People told me it couldn't happen. Well, it has happened and I think the guys who came up with the idea and those who use it must have their heads in the clouds.

[sbeasla]

05:33 PM on 04/21/2011

This is pretty upsetting. You hear so much talk about trusting the cloud and putting your information into the cloud and something like this happens. But then again....everyone has their tech hiccups, there are bound to be outages from time to time as long as the sites remain reliable overall.

[flamenco]

05:32 PM on 04/21/2011

Cloud computing has been so hyped. But it can fail, just like any type of hosting. I have a colleague that signed up with the Rackspace cloud because of their guarantee of 100% uptime(!) and their good reputation. I told her that what this really means is that they'll refund you some money under certain conditions. It doesn't mean you'll get anything for lost business caused by downtime. She ended up canceling her account because you really need to be a server admin to use most cloud hosting.

Pretty much all hosting has up-time guarantees of 99+%. So it becomes meaningless. Every host has outages, and getting a refund is possible, but not certain, if you have downtime. All you can really do is shop carefully. And even good hosts can go bad. I know through personal experience.