S3 Outage Illustrates Outsourcing Risks

By Greg McNevin

February 20, 2008: One of the perils of online data storage and the outsourcing of critical business functions in general was highlighted late last week when online retailer Amazon.com’s data storage service went down for a number of hours.

The outage left businesses that rely on the company’s popular Simple Storage Service (S3) without access to their files, leaving many annoyed at the lack of access or even notification that there was a problem on Amazon’s end.

“For one of our services, the Amazon Simple Storage Service, one of our three geographic locations was unreachable for approximately two hours and was back to operating at over 99% of normal performance before 7 a.m. pacific standard time,” said the company in a statement.

Around 330,000 (as of the end of 2007) customers use the US$0.15 per GB per month service, which is run off the same cloud computing infrastructure Amazon uses for its online retailing business. While it is unclear how many were effected in the outage, Amazon has been quick to assure its customers that no data was lost during the downtime.

“We’ve been operating this service for two years and we’re proud of our uptime track record. Any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect,” Amazon added in another statement to customers in its support forum.

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