It took Amazon until midday Monday to say that its cloud was back up after it crashed in a nasty electrical storm on the East Coast Friday night bringing down Amazon-dependent companies like Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest.
Hundreds of thousands of households were still without power Monday.
The thunderstorm blew out power for a little while at its giant Virginia data center and Amazon’s backup power in one of its data centers longer.
It’s the third time Amazon has gone down since April. It experienced a power outage in Virginia a couple of weeks ago.
This time EC2, Relational Database, Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic Block Storage services in at least one of the 10 data centers it reportedly has in Virginia were impacted. Some writes to EBS weren’t saved or didn’t update various volumes.
Most services seem to have come back by Saturday but Amazon remained tight-lipped about it until Monday when it claimed only a single digit percentage of its customers had been affected.
The impacted Amazon customers don’t seem to have invested in disaster recovery and redundancy in another availability zone.