Issues
In early July 2008 the anti-spam organizations Outblaze and Spamhaus.org began blocking Amazon's EC2 address pool due to problems with the distribution of spam and malware.
On December 1, 2010, Amazon pulled its service to WikiLeaks after coming under political pressure in the USA. The Internet group Anonymous attempted to attack EC2 in revenge; however, Amazon was not affected by the attack.
Amazon's websites were temporarily offline on December 12, 2010, although it was initially unclear if this was due to attacks or a hardware failure. An Amazon official later stated that it was due to a hardware failure.
Shortly before 5 am Eastern on April 21, 2011, an outage started at EC2's northern Virginia data center that brought down several websites, including Foursquare, Springpad, Reddit, Quora, BigDoor and Hootsuite. Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the datacenter (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day; problems for at least some customers were continuing as of April 25. 0.07% of EBS volumes in one zone have also been lost; EBS failures were a part of normal operation even before this outage and were a risk documented by Amazon, though the number of failures and the number of simultaneous failures may find some EC2 users unprepared.
On Sunday August 6, 2011, Amazon suffered a power outage in one of their Ireland availability zones. Lightning was originally blamed for the outage; however, on August 11, Irish energy supplier ESB Networks dismissed this as a cause, but at time of writing, could not confirm what the cause of the problem was. The power outage raised multiple questions regarding Amazon's EBS infrastructure, which caused several bugs in their software to be exposed. The bugs resulted in some customers' data being deleted when recovering EBS volumes in a mid-write operation during the crash.
August 8, 2011, saw another network connectivity outage of Amazon's Northern Virginia datacenter, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Quora, Netflix and FourSquare. The outage lasted around 25 minutes.
Another Northern Virginia datacenter outage occurred on October 22, 2012, from approximately 10 am to 4 pm PT. Edmodo, Airbnb, Flipboard, Reddit, and other customers were affected. Anonymous claimed responsibility, however Amazon denied this assertion.
Read more about this topic: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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