Pinterest, Netflix and other services offline
An amazon data centre has lost power during a thunderstorm causing a massive blackout for some of the web’s biggest sites including Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Linkedin, Netflix, Instagram and others.
The outage occurred at Amazon’s web Services Data Center in Northern Virginia which had a knock on effect on other websites. Amazon is currently restoring virtual machines that host websites in ‘the Amazon cloud’.
This is the latest incident to affect Amazon servers but as of yet they have not managed to switch over to backup power supplies to maintain their datacenters.
With so many websites hosted on the Amazon cloud, serious questions are being raised about the viability of cloud hosting services in general. If one datacenter goes down, millions of sites can be taken offline in seconds.
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A majority of websites have been restored, but users may face continued interruptions over the next 24 hours.