In addition to the hive mind found at Reddit other service such as Foursquare, Pinterest, TMZ, Instagram, Flipboard, AirBnB, Imgur and GetGlue were also offline.  This is a pretty large number of services to be down and illustrates a danger in moving to the cloud. By our count Amazon has had at least one node down more than five times this year alone. What is unacceptable is that some of the outages have been due to power (any data center should have redundant power) or networking. This time we do not have an official statement from Amazon, but they are still reporting that many services in their N. Virginia data center are “degraded” including; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

These services are important to the proper function of Amazon’s clients. But cloud outages are not limited to Amazon; Microsoft has had a couple of outages this year with their Xbox service and put them down to upgrades made to the system, but some of their outages cannot be swept under the upgrade rug like the ones they have had with Azure in some parts of Europe. It would not be good for Microsoft to start pushing Windows 8 and their cloud based services like Xbox Music (which Microsoft is giving away free with a Surface RT Tablet) and Office 365 only to have those services taken down by DDoS attacks or simple data center issues.  Unfortunately this is what we do expect to start happening remember Microsoft (Russia) backed a torrent swarm hunting company and Microsoft in the US was connected to both SOPA and PIPA as well as being involved (although not directly) with the Megaupload takedown.  With their track record here you cannot expect them to remain unscathed for long… it did not take Anonymous and their splinter groups long to take down the PSN network, how long do you really think it will take before they turn their attention to a more cloud based Microsoft?

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