Amazon S3 Goes Down for 3 Hours

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) had it's first major outage in years going down for 3+ hours and taking down 1000's of web 2.0 sites with it. Many new companies rely on Amazon's services to run their business so when Amazon goes down, they go down (myself included).

There is a big thread that you can read about it on the AWS forums and see Amazon's Post Mortem response:

Here’s some additional detail about the problem we experienced earlier today.
Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations.  While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests.  Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.
Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls.  The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place.  In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles.  This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST.  By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.
As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable.  As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements.  We are taking immediate action on the following:  (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls.  Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

Of course it's bad that this happened, but really not so bad when you think about it. How fast could you recover your own database and servers when they go down? And we all know, things go down at some point or another. And since Amazon puts out the fires, you get to keep more of your hair.

via: InfoWorld