Dark “Clouds” Forming After Netflix Outage Blamed On Amazon [View all]

[UnrepentantLiberal]

PHILADELPHIA – From Christmas Eve through noon on Christmas Day, Netflix customers couldn’t watch any TV shows or movies on the service.

Over the holiday, a glitch at Amazon’s facility in suburban Washington, DC left Netflix users with nothing on their screens.

“Part of the reason is that it’s the largest and oldest of Amazon data centres and it’s also the data centre on which Amazon deploys new services first,” Darrow says. “While companies are supposed to be dividing their workloads among different data centers, sometimes you don’t have the choice because you’re using a new service that is available only from Amazon US-East.”

An outage there in October affected sites and services like Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, and FourSquare. Darrow says such issues are a PR problem for cloud providers like Amazon, and worse for companies who have no control over what’s happening.

“Especially because Amazon is really wanting businesses to let them handle more of their mission-critical workload. It’s one thing for an online video site to go out — it’s an inconvenience and a pain. But if it’s a business database or accounting system, that’s a whole other issue. Things like this will spook CEOs going forward. Because this gets huge coverage. If I’m a CIO, and I want to go to Amazon, my boss is going to say, ‘isn’t that the cloud that went out over Christams eve?’”

More: http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/12/26/dark-clouds-forming-after-netflix-outage-blamed-on-amazon/