Hidden bugs that made Amazon Web Service outage worse
Amazon Web Services' prolonged down time over the weekend was caused by lightning, according to the company -- but was lengthened by software bugs in the cloud provider's infrastructure.
The bugs, disclosed by Amazon in an analysis of the failure, show how the size at which cloud providers operate can make them acutely vulnerable to failures in their software systems -- and acts as an object lesson of Google's statement that "at scale, everything breaks."
According to Amazon, its cloud in its U.S. East region (10 data centrers split across four availability zones) was initially troubled by utility power fluctuations, probably caused by an electrical storm.
