Another Amazon Outage Is Affecting Websites and Consumers

When the outage issue arose it wasn’t a widespread problem. It was a small problem that affected some of Amazon’s EC2 services in North Virginia. However, that small outage quickly turned into a full-blown problem. Major services including Foursquare, Heroku, GitHub and HipChat have all been affected, as well as other sites that are hosted on the platform.

While the website outage is not nationwide, it is affecting a number of frustrated website operators. As IWPR tweeted, “Our http://iwpr.net website is part of the Amazon outage and is currently off-line. Thank you for your patience.” The Environmental Expert website is also down, with the site communicating via Twitter stating “Our website is currently down due to an outage from our hosting provider Amazon Web Services.” And so we begin to see the domino effect.

The sad thing is that this is not the first time that Amazon has had a problem with its EC2 services. You’d think that with the problems the cloud computing servers have encountered in recent months, Amazon would be on top of making sure its servers are running smoothly. Apparently that isn’t the case and there are still some glitches that need to be attended to. This hasn’t been overlooked by the public as twitter member Daniel O’Leary tweeted “If you want to run a cloud @amazon , call Lando.”

What’s the major problem in all of this? The fact that while people are tweeting up a storm, Amazon has not replied with any reason for the outage or any indication of when services are expected to be up and running again.

If Customers Tweet, Tweet Back

No one likes to feel as if they are talking to a brick wall. When the masses are tweeting about a problem and the company responsible for the issue does not tweet back, that is exactly what it feels like. Some of the websites that have been affected by the Amazon outage have taken it upon themselves to let their customers know what is going on via Twitter’s services. Amazon itself, however, has yet to utter a single word to those who have been tweeting. If your site goes down, don’t make your customers feel as though their concerns are going unheard. If they tweet, tweet back. Keep them updated. You’ll save your customers quite a bit of frustration and you may just save your company’s reputation by doing so.