Amazon says its market-leading cloud platform housed more than 200 custom-built applications for President Obama's re-election campaign, resulting in a temporary IT deployment that rivals the scope and complexity of IT services at the largest enterprises.
An unexpected bug cropped up after new hardware was installed in one of Amazon Web Service's Northern Virginia data centers, which caused the more than 12-hour outage last week that brought down popular sites such as Reddit, Imgur, AirBNB and Salesforce.com's Heroku platform, according to a postmortem issued by Amazon.
Amazon Web Services makes a big deal out of its availability zones, recommending that customers use multiple AZs to build clouds that are tolerant of failures like the one the company recently experienced.
Amazon Web Services has almost fully recovered from a more than 12-hour event that appears to have started by only impacting a small number of customers but quickly snowballed into a larger issue that took down major sites including Reddit, Imgur and others yesterday.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service is experiencing degraded service, leading sites across the Internet to experience downtime, including Reddit, Imgur and many others.