outage

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?

No. In short, the computing industry is making up what's called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that's one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it's notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.

Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of … Read more

Update at 8 p.m. PDT: Amazon's Service Health Dashboard reported around 5:25 p.m. PDT that U.S. and European service "has been fully restored" and that the company "will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation."

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service--a major component of its online computing services--is apparently experiencing problems Sunday.

The e-tailer's "Service Health Dashboard" reports that the S3 service in both the United States and Europe is experiencing "elevated error rates."

The outage is causing CenterNetworks images … Read more

Amid the shaky launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple's new MobileMe service--a juiced-up revamp of its .Mac offering--also took a blow. Apple has consequently opted to entitle eligible members to 30 days free as a we're-sorry gift.

.Mac accounts had been scheduled to "migrate" to MobileMe last Wednesday evening, but instead produced an outage in which neither service was available. New subscribers, meanwhile, had experienced issues signing up.

"The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was a lot rockier than we had hoped," a details page from Apple explained. The offer isn't for … Read more

A number of us at CNET News noticed that Facebook was having some outage issues on Monday afternoon, delivering "connection to the server was reset while the page was loading" messages to members of our editorial staff in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

The off-and-on outages would make the social network available to some while inaccessible to others, and sometimes lasted for a few minutes before coming back. Facebook has not yet confirmed the presence of outages, but a company spokeswoman said via e-mail that she was looking into it. Meanwhile, connections appear to have been restored … Read more

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Social network Facebook experienced what appears to have been a very brief server outage on Tuesday morning--15 minutes, tops--but looking at Twitter keyword search site Summize, you'd think it were cause for mass panic:

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was … Read more

Update 4:36 p.m. PDT with outside comment about possible causes of the Amazon.com outage.

A two-hour Amazon.com outage is over. Now on to the post-mortem: what triggered the problem?

Amazon declared itself clear of the problem this afternoon. "The Amazon retail site was down for approximately two hours earlier today beginning around 10:25 a.m. The site (is) back up," the company said in statement.

But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

"Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare … Read more