Lightning knocks Amazon, Microsoft clouds offline

BANGALORE, INDIA: Power outage, caused by a lightning strike, resulted in the outage of Amazon and Microsoft's cloud data centres.

The lightning that struck in Dublin, Ireland, a couple of days back caused downtime for many users of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as Microsoft’s (Business Productivity Online Suite) BPOS platforms.

EC2 Availability Zones in Dublin data centre is Amazon's primary European hub for its cloud computing platform.

“Normally, upon dropping the utility power provided by the transformer, electrical load would be seamlessly picked up by backup generators,” Amazon said in a statement to its customers on its Service Health Dashboard. “The transient electric deviation caused by the explosion was large enough that it propagated to a portion of the phase control system that synchronizes the backup generator plant, disabling some of them.”

Microsoft, which first tweeted that a European data centre power issue had affected access to its BPOS services, said in a statement that a "widespread power outage in Dublin caused connectivity issues for European BPOS customers and has updated its Service Health Dashboard. Throughout the incident, we updated our customers regularly on the issue via our normal communication channels.”

As of Wednesday, where on one hand Amazon had updated its Service Health Dashboard saying that all of its services are functioning normally, except for a disruption in N Virginia.

On the other, Microsoft tweeted that its BPOS service are back online for its EMEA customers, and also updated its Service Health Dashboard for its customers.

Such outages are sure to cast doubt on the reliability factor of cloud services. What do you think?