Poor Aviary.com is still down, forced to replace its site with a screenshot of the homepage and an apology: “Our hosting company (amazon EC2) is experiencing a large-scale outage that is affecting many sites across the internet, including Reddit, FourSquare and us. They are working to resolve the problem and we’ll let you know as soon as we’re back. Meanwhile, enjoy this preview of our new homepage!”
Amazon is still experiencing errors and latency in at least three facilities, according to their status page. We’re waiting to hear how Amazon plans to compensate the sites that experienced extended downtime in light of the cloud host’s promise of 99.95 percent uptime. (Amazon’s uptime is now at 99.65 percent across the web, according to a website put up by Yuval Adam, a Tel Aviv developer.)
This major outage is just about the worst publicity for Amazon Web Services, which is seen as the cheapest and easiest cloud hosting provider. Amazon’s main competitor, Rackspace, is seen as the spendier, higher quality server farm, but Rackspace has decided not to seize the moment: “We never sell on our competitor’s pain. We want happy customers, not ones that switched under painful conditions,” tweeted lead Rackspace evangelist Robert Scoble. Probably a good position to take–Rackspace has had its share of outages as well.
New York investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica Ablebots also put together a list of sites affected by the outage. (h/t to ProPublica’s Dan Nguyen)
