Amazon's S3 Down for Several Hours
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Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.
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Research In Motion still can't say why its BlackBerry service went down for several hours yesterday.
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Plus, Amazon blacks out, a sad day for Colgate, and profiting from questions.
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Second outage in a year BlackBerry users got some time yesterday to smell the flowers and talk to their families and friends - the company's email servers went down just after 3pm Eastern Standard Time.â¦
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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Amazon.com, eBay and other retailers fell in U.S. trading as cash-strapped consumers limited their Internet holiday purchases while waiting for better bargains.
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A massive telephone service outage is affecting thousands in West Virginia, after FiberNet had a network failure that affected both its primary and backup systems. The problem began at 5:30am and continues to persist five hours later. Hospitals, fire departments, businesses and homes are affected.
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Company provides few details on outage, which came two days after online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.'s Web site faced significant performance problems.
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Some Rhapsody users are huffing and puffing but the service won't let them in. Second outage since March blocks an unknown number of customers and some are frustrated that the company doesn't know when it will be fixed.
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Complaints that online store is down, among others.
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Alexa.com can't keep itself up Alexa.com, the page ranking service owned by Amazon, has suffered a week of intermittent downtime.â¦
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Amazon's virtual storage service, S3, suffered a 2.5-hour service failure Friday morning, causing outages and other problems at a wide range of web businesses. Most customers remained unconcerned, however.
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SEATTLE Amazon-dot-com says things are running normally again on its Web site after a sometimes sluggish Monday. A spokeswoman says the world&#39;s largest Internet retailer began experiencing &quot;a slowness&quot; Monday morning.
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Aclockalypse Not Panic over: America survived Sunday's onslaught of Daylight Saving Time (DST) on Sunday unscathed. For a while, Bug-watchers thought that GoDaddy, the domain registrar, might have mismanaged the time-change, after customers reported outages. But, a good old-fashioned DDOS attack was the culprit.â¦
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Shares of Amazon.com  fell more than 16 percent on Thursday after the online retailer reported earnings that fell short of analysts estimates and raised concerns the company was focusing more on sales than profits.
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I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They're taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we're hot on a big story, and it's developing -- on Twitter. This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.) I don't think the Twitter guys really understand how much we're doing with their service.  It's been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it's losing them regularly, for me too. Read the first three words of this post again.  They raised $5 million, it seems now it's time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It's not a fun experiment for us, we're using it.  Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred -- please take note. Postscript: The announcement changed, now they're saying it'll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!
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Recent technical glitches have stopped some holiday shoppers from completing purchases at Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , but the Web retailer&#39;s