Friday, April 22, 2011

Amazon EC2 goes down, taking with it Reddit, Foursquare and Quora

Cloud computing issues bring down Social media sites Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and others due to Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors yesterday.

For those of you that don't know, including me, Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network. In the traditional model of computing, both data and software are fully contained on the user's computer; in cloud computing, the user's computer may contain almost no software or data (perhaps a minimal operating system and web browseronly), serving as little more than a display terminal for processes occurring on a network of computers far away.

Quora even has a fun ‘down’ message: “We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” And a funny YouTube video.

One of the sites that was down includes xtranormal, it has been down since yesterday. It's strange how we have come to expect for these sites to work all the time and when they don't it's a real disappointment. If a site is down to resolve issues and for maintenance, is it acceptable to you? Would you return to the site?

Access the full article here.

1 comment:

Paige H said...

I think we have a tendency to forgive sites for being down because even the biggest sites like Twitter and Facebook have their days when you cannot login or access the information that you want to. I still go back at least because I know that it will end up getting fixed as quickly as possible. I'm not sure if everyone feels this way but we Americans generally have a very short attention span it seems.