This year, the London Olympics Committee used cloud computing muscle to simulate the predicted traffic that would hit its servers during the games.

Engineers spent six months running scenarios of swarms and spikes against the official Olympic websites and mobile apps. SOASTA, an American company, employed the cloud power of Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure to simulate both patterns of individual users and business applications. 

Cloud services have been able to instantly access a vast amount of virtual servers from anywhere on the globe.  SOASTA provided results to assured organisers that their servers would survive hits from up to 1 billion people over the 17 days that the games are scheduled.

What they didn’t count on was the opposite effect – that the Olympic Games might take down the cloud.

On July 26 the Dublin-based Microsoft Azure cloud went down for about the length of the new Batman movie. No …