Netflix, Other Web-Based Services Interrupted By Storms In East
Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest services in the Northeast were interrupted last night when Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in Northern Virginia went offline because of severe thunderstorms, Forbes reports. Amazon EC2 servers handle web traffic for numerous companies in addition to those mentioned. Service was disrupted at around 11:21 PM Eastern time according to Amazon: “We are investigating connectivity issues for a number of instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Affected users aired complaints on Twitter and Facebook. Storms that caused the outages also knocked out power in broad swaths from Indiana to New Jersey, according to the Washington Post. Netflix appeared to be back online as of 1:15 am Eastern time. Mashable reports that Pinterest, Instagram (whose pending purchase by Facebook awaits regulatory approval) and Heroku were still down this morning in some areas. Amazon reported most services had been restored before dawn Eastern time. Last night’s outage follows a 6 1/2-hour outage on Amazon’s EC2 two weeks ago. Forbes pointed out that one of the selling points of “cloud computing” is that there are redundancies to prevent just such occurrences.
The Washington, D.C. area got it so bad that much of the area won’t get electric power back for at least another couple of weeks.
Some outlying areas may not get power back for weeks!
And in the next day or two, all-time record high temperatures will be set.
Netflix was down here last night, as well. L.A. I tried it on the blu-ray and the laptop, no dice. Why would it affect the West Coast?
I believe Netflix runs all of their login and movie browsing features out of the Amazon Virginia Center only. Once you login and choose your movie you are then connected to the closest third party content delivery network (Limelight, Level3, or Akamai) that actually streams the video to you.
Since The Cloud can be knocked offline by a real cloud, proselytizers of The Cloud can kiss my ass. Actual product — discs, memory cards, etc. — is the only credible way to buy any intellectual property.
So how did the people in the Virginia area with no power for two days enjoy their “actual product”? Does having physical media somehow enable you to watch movies without electricity?
@Rob J.: You stole my thunder. Long live physical media! Any Fortune 500 company that trusts, and outsources to boot, their (an more importantly YOUR) information to a cloud based database are idiots. I’m just wringing my hands for the first important (i.e. banking) fail to see what happens.
Facebook does not own Instagram. It’s purchase is awaiting FTC approval.