Some people are seeing a downside to the cloud lately.
Storms in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region late last week led to a long outage of Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), which includes the company's cloud storage initiatives. The service interruption, which lasted from late Friday into Saturday before being fixed, was the second Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage since mid-June.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services – also called Web services – that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com (News - Alert). The most central and well-known of these services are Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
One of the companies that uses Amazon Web Services affected by the outage is online dating site WhatsYourPrice.com, which is choosing to dump both Amazon and its cloud, according to Computerworld.
WhatsYourPrice.com, where members bid for first dates, said in a statement that the Amazon services outages “produce a lot of unhappy customers” (without dates, presumably).
Brandon Wade, CEO and founder of WhatsYourPrice.com, said Amazon's recent failure damaged the dating site's reputation for reliability among its 400,000 users.
“100 percent uptime is a required SLA for anyone providing cloud computing services,” said Wade. “Amazon's inability to provide such service levels is the main reason we have decided to quit using AWS EC2 altogether.”
WhatsYourPrice.com wasn't the only company affected by the outage. The blackout interrupted a number of high-profile Web services such as Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest, as well as a number of other, smaller companies that run all or part of their businesses in the Amazon cloud.