I’m a great fan of Amazon.
I admire what they have done for technology, especially with their AWS Platform.
However, when the company decided to blame a “hardware failure” for their outages yesterday evening, I felt they were trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
An Amazon spokesman said: ‘The brief interruption to our European retail sites last night was due to hardware failure in our European data centre network and not the result of a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attempt.’
Hacktivist group “Anonymous” had already said that Amazon would be targeted with a DDOS attack, that saw Mastercard, Paypal and Visa sites taken down for a period of a few hours, in the last 7 days
If such “hardware failures” can mean downtime in the busiest period for their ecommerce site, then what about AWS? How seriously do they take uptime? What is in place to prevent this happening on the AWS platform?
I use AWS for personal projects, as well as business critical applications at work, and chose the platform to mitigate risks of our own hardware related issues.
I believe they should come clean, and admit that Anonymous, and their DDOS attack, got the better of them, rather than forgetting about their AWS customers, and worrying them of perceived hardware outages.
It has certainly prompted me to look again at alternatives!