Published on the 27/04/2011 | Written by Newsdesk

In what’s being described as the “worst outage in cloud computing history”, Amazon data centres went down over the Easter break, impacting thousands of customers, including many IT service providers and popular social networking services using the Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud.

An unknown network event caused the outage last Thursday at approximately 8pm New Zealand time, affecting multiple data centres and keeping some customers offline until well into the weekend.

During the blackout, Amazon engineers reported their progress on the company’s status page, stating that “[t]he work we’re doing to enable customers to be able to launch EBS backed instances and create, delete, attach and detach EBS volumes in the affected Availability Zone is taking considerably more time than we anticipated”.

Although Amazon Web Services are back online, experts are saying that the Amazon event is evidence that cloud users need to accept more responsibility for managing cloud technology effectively for high availability, or pay the price: “As I blogged yesterday,” wrote cloud computing consultant Scott Sanchez on his CloudNod blog, “many of the higher profile sites that were down…simply chose to ignore the options available to them today and instead chose to point the finger at Amazon instead of looking in the mirror. Lots of reasons why they prefer finger to mirror… cost, time, skill, or all of the above.”

A recent update from the Amazon status page states that an explanation for the outage is not yet available, but is pending: “The [Amazon] team has been completely focused on restoring access to all customers, and as such has not yet been able to focus on performing a complete post mortem. Once our customers have been taken care of and are fully back up and running, we will post a detailed account of what happened, along with the corrective actions we are undertaking to ensure this doesn’t happen again”.