Curious why there are those with an online business, who believe that handing over their entire back office infrastructure to one company, aka "going cloud" may not be the wisest of ideas. Just ask all those websites that use Amazon's cloud service today, who suddenly went dark when the Amazon cloud crashed.
Amazon’s data centers in Northern Virginia crashed Monday afternoon, taking with it a number of popular Web sites, from Someecards, the quirky e-card company, to mobile applications like Flipboard and Foursquare.
Amazon reported having problems with the data centers in Northern Virginia. Those problems appear to have had a ripple effect across the Internet with several sites hosted on Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud hosting service also reporting problems.
Several frustrated customers took to Twitter Monday to complain that they could not get access to Web sites including Foursquare, turntable.fm and Flipboard. It appears that some of the affected services then affected services that, in turn, ran on them. Because they are all hosted on Amazon’s cloud service, there is a ripple effect. They all go down when the original hosting servers go down.
Last June, an electrical storm caused problems at the same Northern Virginia data centers and took down sites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram for a weekend.
“Like many other services, we’ve been taken down by the outage,” said Erin Gleason, a spokeswoman for Foursquare, the mobile check-in service. “Both the site and the app are inaccessible right now.”
Ms. Gleason said the company was still awaiting guidance and updates from Amazon about when its service might be restored.
“Hoping to get things back up and running ASAP,” she said.
And just like HFT has taken the entire market hostage, in the most insidiuous Stockholm Syndrome symbiotic relationship, so the cloud will do that same to the internet, in some cases with insidious crossover: recall that various stock exchanges are already using the cloud to host their services. Basically what will end up happening is that one day the mega-uber-cloud will crash, and the entire internet will be down.
Hopefully not on demand.