back to article AWS outage knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb in MEGA data collapse

Amazon's Web Services (AWS) have suffered a monster outage affecting the company's cloudy systems, bringing some sites down with it in the process. The service disruption hit AWS customers including Netflix, Tinder and IMDb, as well as Amazon's Instant Video and Books websites. The outage may also explain Airbnb's current …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IMDB is an Amazon property,not a customer.

    If this knocked Netflix offline for long it must have been big given how aggressively they build around failure.

  2. elDog

    Good thing Bezos is not an avatar living in Amazonia!

    Pretty soon we'll get to the place that real computers and real humans are no longer necessary for the proper functioning of this planet. Given this minor bpli we mya b ether no...

    1. adnim
      Facepalm

      Re: Good thing Bezos is not an avatar living in Amazonia!

      "Pretty soon we'll get to the place that real computers and real humans are no longer necessary for the proper functioning of this planet."

      They never have been, the planet has functioned perfectly for around 4.5 billion years. The planet did shoot itself in the foot though... It allowed humans to evolve.

      1. DLSmith

        Re: Good thing Bezos is not an avatar living in Amazonia!

        Not to worry, before long we will have killed ourselves off, and after a few millenia, few signs we existed will be around.

  3. big_D Silver badge

    Aha

    that would explain why I couldn't finish watching Lawrence of Arabia earlier on...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Aha

      I suggest moving to a more resilient and robust service that involves those pesky torrents...

      I applaud at your taste in films.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Aha

        Anyone know if Amazon's version of Netflix was impacted? Or do they give their own stuff higher priority?

        1. big_D Silver badge

          Re: Aha

          I don't have Netflix, I just have Prime Instant Video - I only have that, because I was already a Prime subscriber...

      2. earl grey
        Pint

        Re: Aha

        recall seeing it in the cinema long ago. still have the LP of the soundtrack. well done all around.

    2. Crazy Operations Guy

      Re: Aha

      I couldn't finish it either, but that probably has more to do wit the fact that the movie is just so bloody long... 3 hours and 45 minutes, that borders on torture right there.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Aha @Crazy Ops Guy

        But you have the lovely Intermission in the middle. You just turn up the music, then you can go to the loo and make yourself some caffeine based sustenance to keep you going.

        It is a great film and the rolling dunes really need a large screen to be appreciated.

      2. Frumious Bandersnatch

        Re: Aha

        [Lawrence of Arabia] is just so bloody long

        And wide, too. A 2.20:1 aspect ratio in its original 70mm form, to be exact. A bitch to watch on a 1.33 ratio HD screen, sans doute.

        1. Simon Harris

          Re: Aha

          Probably not so much of a bitch to watch on most people's 1.777:1 ratio HD screens.

        2. Chris Holford

          Re: Aha

          That's why the cinema is the best place to watch good movies.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Aha

            Anything good on at the cinema?

            1. introdium

              Re: Aha

              The Gift..is good.... kinda thriller/drama would that be a 'driller' ??

  4. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Perhaps Amazon

    dialled up the wrong sort of Clouds?

    If this is not a wakeup call to those who seem to want to tell us all that 'the Cloud' is the answer to Life, the Univers and Everything. But they seem to forget about the Vogon's and their Galactic Highway.

    1. Franco

      Re: Perhaps Amazon

      Clearly the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Marketing Department is doing a better job than the tech bods

      1. Synonymous Howard

        Re: Perhaps Amazon

        Share and Enjoy!

        1. nsld

          Re: Perhaps Amazon

          Its probably eddies in the space time continuum, just chuck up a SEP field and be done with it.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Perhaps Amazon

            LIGO was just upgraded to pick up just such an indicator of a massive cosmic event so we should know soon.

        2. Crazy Operations Guy

          Re: Perhaps Amazon

          Go stick your head in a pig!

          1. monty75

            Re: Perhaps Amazon

            *insert David Cameron joke here*

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Perhaps Amazon

      You are obviously not aware that we were simply acting on behalf of a consortium of psychiatrists and the Imperial Galactic Government in order to prevent the discovery of the Ultimate Question...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For goodness sake Jeff...

    Its one thing being bald, but you're just taking the slash mate!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

    Discuss.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

      It fits the first criterion for disaster recovery and issue management:

      - Can you blame someone else (and wait for them to fix the issue)?

      - Yes -> Problem solved.

      That's why cloud is and will be highly successful.

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

      I need more statistics.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

      Netflix moved to AWS a few years ago. Look at their subscriber numbers and revenue over the past few years. Discuss.

    4. Dadmin

      Re: The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

      This seems like a GREAT IDEA! Let me just leverage this big company that seems to be a solid bunch of chaps to hold all my important data, because they said they could for next to nothing and they should be online forever! Super!

      *puts all data into cloud

      Good stuff!

      *outage

      I'm a stupid dickhead who reads CIO Magazine, and now all my data is missing. :(

      1. Dwarf

        Re: The cloud - the greatest and safest new place for all your infrastructure and critical data

        Think Dilbert sums it up nicely here

        http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-07-05

  7. Jeffrey Nonken

    Well. That explains why I was having weird problems with IMDB early this morning. (I was up until about 5am California time.) Netflix was mostly running ok for me though. Mostly.

    I thought it was my phone having a go. Rebooting seemed to clear my phone networking issues and meantime I switched Netflix to my laptop but IMDB never cleared up. Very puzzling.

    I feel much enlightened now.

  8. Mark 85

    Those who live by the cloud, die by the cloud....

  9. i steal your leccy
    Trollface

    RE: Main PHOTO

    Must remember to get a Cardboard Box tomorrow, looks like my pet Tortoise is getting ready to start Hibernating for the winter!

  10. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Hm.

    I wonder if that was related to a lot of my searches on Amazon.com returning pages and pages of items marked "currently not available for sale" - that seemed a bit nonsensical even for Amazon's amazingly shitty search feature.

  11. Novex
    FAIL

    Eggs

    Eggs, meet basket. Basket, meet eggs.

    1. KLane
      IT Angle

      Re: Eggs

      Should be: Eggs, meet basket. Basket, 'what eggs?'

      1. VinceH

        Re: Eggs

        More like:

        Eggs, meet basket. Basket, meet eggs. They're your responsibility now.

        <later>

        Basket, I want a couple of those eggs.

        "Your eggs are currently unavailable."

    2. Tom 13

      Re: Eggs

      Om letting that alone.

  12. Howard Hanek
    Coat

    Somewhere in the Ether

    The constant stream of warm air thermals from the creators of the 'cloud' was suddenly interrupted by a blast of frigid reality leaving many wondering exactly how do 'clouds' get lost.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Somewhere in the Ether

      Maybe they evaporate in all the hot air generated by server farms?

  13. Rol

    Would laughing my socks off be inappropriate at this point?

    Perhaps so.

    I'll just stick to gloating. Smugly. With a wry grin. And an eyebrow raised in honour to all those who predicted this very event.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Would laughing my socks off be inappropriate at this point?

      Predicted? It's not like this is the first time the almighty redundancy monster, the cloud has gone tits down..

  14. Nate Amsden

    Haha

    In the voice of nelson

    HA HA!

  15. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    I wandered, lonely as a cloud.

    That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

    When all at once I saw a crowd,

    A host, of angry customers;

    1. Arctic fox
      Happy

      @Will Godfrey "I wandered, lonely as a cloud"

      Your words are certainly worth an upvote old chap.

      1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: @Will Godfrey "I wandered, lonely as a cloud"

        Well spotted, have an upvote from me :)

        1. Arctic fox
          Thumb Up

          @Will Godfrey "Well spotted"

          Thank you. I am relived that somebody spotted my little play on words (worth) - it does of course not surprise me in the circumstances that it was you!

  16. P. Lee

    Unpopular though I'm going to be for it

    and as much as I despise most of the cloud, the real question is one of relativity. The problem is of unstable clouds is moot if your own infrastructure is worse.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Unpopular though I'm going to be for it

      Usually requires a tensor, but capabilities by provider by cost by (actual!) reliability. Maximize by bed get. {Shrug} I mostly see the least accurate assessment on all axes for self-provisioned resources and costs. That hasn't changed in human history yet, so I won't go on a hunger-strike over it.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Unpopular though I'm going to be for it

      Yes, but n worse infrastructures has less chances to break at the same time, while a single big single one, even if less slightly bad overall, when breaks, brings with it a lot of separated, unrelated, "subinfrastructures" without any chances for them.

      From a user perspective, I'm more worried of several services becoming unavailable at the same time, than just a single one. Clouds needs to be far, far better than you own infrastructure, not just "somewhat".

    3. Tom 13

      Re: Unpopular though I'm going to be for it

      If your own infrastructure is unstable, the cloud is not going to help.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I thought part of the point of [my butt] was FAILOVER...

    WTF is the redundancy bezotwit, even your retail site was affected, do'h!

    Epic FAIL!

    1. Ruairi Newman 1

      Re: I thought part of the point of [my butt] was FAILOVER...

      Oddly there are a lot of people complaining that it is the fault of an IaaS provider for their customers failure to design redundancy into their solutions. AWS is Infrastructure as a Service, not a managed service. So, though I have my own reasons not to be fond of a few of their services, blaming them for someone elses failure to understand the platform on which they were deploying seems a little unfair.

      AWS services went down due to an AWS balls-up. Their customers services went down due to customers not deploying redundant solutions in the AWS cloud - or indeed a multi-vendor deployment, if you have to have your backup options in the same region.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I thought part of the point of [my butt] was FAILOVER...

        This would all be true if the people knocked offline weren't so publically committed to planning redundancy.

        Netflix are the poster child for correct use of infrastructure as a service and if this knocked them offline then something went wrong with the redundancy planning features that AWS makes available.

        AWS is a lot more than dumb IaaS these days and this is something bigger than a single availability zone taking a nap.

      2. calmeilles

        Re: I thought part of the point of [my butt] was FAILOVER...

        "AWS services went down due to an AWS balls-up. Their customers services went down due to customers not deploying redundant solutions in the AWS cloud - or indeed a multi-vendor deployment, if you have to have your backup options in the same region."

        That. Exactly that.

        Cannot be repeated too often.

  18. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Cloud?

    I don't think you can call it a cloud if it's all in one datacenter. That's just called a "datacenter".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloud?

      NB This was a slowdown across an AWS region; it likely affected multiple data centers in that region. I expect Voegels et al will take this pretty seriously.

  19. tiln
    IT Angle

    Cloud == Clown

    Cloud != A place to store backups, or even data.

  20. Richard Altmann

    Cloud

    is the most precise description for this dead born child. It either vaporizes or rains down after everyone interested had a good look at its composition.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why do most Technology Entrepreneurs ...

    ... look like follicly-challenged James Bond villians?

  22. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Pint

    After all the snide remarks

    ... I would like to see the operators haemorraging money on Monday morning (while waiting for the support guy to show up) as they find their in-house servers titsup and need to work all day on getting them online again.

    We need both sides of the coin.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      The main, vast difference between the Cloud falling over and the server room of an individual company is the fact that the company's servers falling over only impacts that company and its clients.

      When the Cloud falls down, it takes ALL ITS CUSTOMERS with it, and all of THEIR customers are impacted. That is exponentially different.

      And I thought that IT was all about removing Single Point of Failure faults, silly me.

      1. Franco

        As the BOFH would point out to us, every company still has the single point of failure. The beancounters.

        Still, every time I hear about a big cloud outage I just hear Kryten saying "Ahh, smug mode".

      2. smartypants

        Replace the word cloud with electricity...

        It isn't saying anything significant to point out the scale of disruption of a cloud outage. Society is used to sharing infrastructure. Power, water, transport etc... And now IT infrastructure. The downsides don't out weight the positives,the vast mass majority of the time, which is why cloud is on the rise and will continue to do so.

        The sensible IT bod will be making sure they're on the Cloud train rather than just laughing at it when it gets stuck at the station. Society will put up with the outages like it puts up with the thousands of smaller issues each day that are caused by private IT screw-ups.

        1. future research

          Re: Replace the word cloud with electricity...

          Companies that really need 100% uptime will still need there own IT (e.g. like hospitals and Data centers have UPS and generation capability) or time some of these will get decommissioned because of the cloud's reliability, (e.g. like the decommissioning of the London underground power station) and then complain bitterly of the very rare outage that takes service out, despite it still exceeding SLA's.

          1. SeanMMasters

            Re: Replace the word cloud with electricity...

            The number of hospitals and datacenters with 100% uptime approaches zero. If keeping things on-premises granted 100% uptime, everything would be on-prem. Instead it's the opposite since engineering, managing, operating and supporting hyper-uptime systems is cost-prohibitive for a majority of companies.

            Instead, we've got backups, continuity solutions, etc.

      3. Ruairi Newman 1

        And I thought that IT was all about removing Single Point of Failure faults, silly me.

        No, you're thinking of redundancy, which these customers apparently didn't think to build into their solutions running on an Infrastructure as a Service provider. Note: NOT a managed service.

    2. palladin9479

      Re: After all the snide remarks

      What in house servers? Oh those old things, they were removed right before the IT staff was redundanted. Saved a ton of money that did, they only had to keep one freshly graduated person on staff to go around showing the rest how to use the new cloud based applications. Still looking for a way to get rid of him too.

      That's what "moving to the cloud" is really about, saving money by firing as many IT staff people as possible.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If only they had used the 'cloud'

    Perhaps if Amazon didn't do their own in-house infrastructure, but rather used the 'cloud' they wouldn't have had this outage....

    1. introdium

      Re: If only they had used the 'cloud'

      suggesting they rent some Rackspace??

  24. iOS6 user

    Bucket of ice water on heads companies moving 100% to AWS

    This case should be bucket of ice water on heads companies moving 100% to AWS.

  25. Simon Harris

    So that's why...

    The IMDB Android application on my phone kept crashing yesterday (d'oh - even tried uninstalling and reinstalling it!)

  26. Unicornpiss
    Happy

    Streamed video all day Sunday

    The gf and I binge watched episodes of "The Kitchen" and "Futurama" on Amazon and Netflix respectively off and on for most of Sunday. Both services worked flawlessly. However, I was in the market for a new pair of pants (unrelated in any way to the streaming or any other Sunday events) and Amazon seemed to think both of the saved shipping addresses I use were incorrect and could not be persuaded otherwise.

  27. Richard Altmann
    FAIL

    Cloud

    is the most precise description for this dead born child. It either vaporizes or rains down after everyone interested had a good look at its composition.

  28. Rick Giles
    Pirate

    This affected another site

    That I won't name, but apparently the IMDb outage caused their site to drop the first episode of the ninth season of a particular BBC show I like...

    I for one haven't been convinced the cloud is all they purport it to be. And this just reinforces that.

  29. adnim
    Joke

    The cloud

    Vapourware?

  30. P.B. Lecavalier

    A not so cloudy cautionary tale

    I have always been skeptical of cloud stuff and never really drank that kool-aid, but the ability to share massive infrastructure can have obvious returns to scale, but clearly, if we are talking of something "important", well, nothing beats the good old "on metal".

    The services that were down are anything but important. I'm even ok if they are down from time to time due to a glitch or (better) some maintenance. What if it's down: Netflix? Read a book. Amazon? So you done reading all the books you ordered? Tinder? Learn how to read!

  31. smartypants

    "if we are talking of something "important", well, nothing beats the good old "on metal"

    You're talking about the unicorn 'on metal' aren't you? The sort that never goes wrong, that always has the right patches, that never has any problem with power or cooling or connectivity, that is only ever managed by people who never make mistakes...

    Yes, that cloud stuff is truly flaky compared with unicorn metal!

    1. P.B. Lecavalier

      > You're talking about the unicorn 'on metal' aren't you?

      I thought after posting that I should have specified nothing beats it, if done right (and yes, that's sometimes/often a little far fetched).

  32. betterman79

    Diversifying risk through multiple cloud vendors is the smart move

    Organizations should consider these AWS failures in the scope of all cloud hosting. History has shown that putting all production with any one company is not wort the risk, no matter how large the provider. Unfortunately AWS has had far too many of these outages and to add insult to injury, the remedies they offer are terrible.

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