Amazon Failure Causes Crashes

Wondering why you had so much trouble today telling your friends about the new burrito joint you discovered? Well, that’s because a smattering of Internet services such as local-based social networking site Foursquare crashed. The culprit: a glitch with Amazon Web Services, which rents out computing power and data storage services on a utility basis over the Internet.

According to Amazon's AWS status dashboard, the problems began around 1:41am PT when sites began experiencing delays and errors when connecting to Amazon’s cloud computing servers. Here’s just a snapshot of this morning’s dashboard:

1:48 AM PDT We are currently investigating connectivity and latency issues with RDS database instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

2:16 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity issues impacting RDS database instances across multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region.

6:29 AM PDT We continue to work on restoring access to the affected Multi AZ instances and resolving the IO latency issues impacting RDS instances in the single availability zone.

8:12 AM PDT Despite the continued effort from the team to resolve the issue we have not made any meaningful progress for the affected database instances since the last update. Create and Restore requests for RDS database instances are not succeeding in US-EAST-1 region.

As of press time, problems remain ongoing.

Earlier this year, TechZone360.com reported that a Germany-based security researcher’s claims he could hack into protected networks using software that runs on Amazon’s cloud-based computers, according to a Reuters report.

Thomas Roth, a computer security consultant based in Cologne, Germany, says he has “figured out a quick and inexpensive way to break a commonly used form of password protection for wireless networks using powerful computers that anybody can lease from Amazon.com (News - Alert) Inc over the Web,” the report said.

According to Roth, he can hack into protected networks using specialized software that he has written that runs on Amazon’s cloud-based computers. It tests 400,000 potential passwords per second using Amazon’s high-speed computers, according to Reuters (News - Alert) report.

And last December, Amazon had to reassure visitors that it hadn’t become the latest casualty of pro-WikiLeaks supporters. Despite being offline for about half an hour in Britain, France, Germany and other countries, the Internet retailer maintained that hardware – not hacktivists – were behind the technical glitch.




Edited by Jennifer Russell