AWS back to normalcy; chances of data loss

BANGALORE, INDIA: After five days of its biggest outage till date, Amazon Web Services said that the glitch on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosting service has been resolved. However, Amazon warns that a small number of volumes (0.07% of the volumes in its US-East Region) will not be fully recoverable.

"Last Thursday Amazon Web Services experienced a disruption to our Elastic Block Store (EBS) service in a portion of one of our five Regions," says Amazon spokesperson Regina Tan.

Problems started appearing on Amazon's EC2 and aggravated when thousands of online sites, including Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite, were knocked off the Internet.

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"EBS began recovering Thursday and by Saturday was operating normally for all APIs and recovered EBS volumes," she adds.

How so ever, until yesterday Amazon's dashboard was still showing 'error' over certain areas, which have been sorted out in its latest update this morning.

"The vast majority of affected volumes have now been recovered. We're in the process of contacting a limited number of customers who have EBS volumes that have not yet recovered and will continue to work hard on restoring these remaining volumes," says Amazon on its website.

Amazon said that it is digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed post mortem.