Microsoft, Amazon Dublin data centre hit by lightning
A Microsoft-owned cloud-computing data centre in Dublin crashed after a lightning strike in the city on Sunday, affecting sites primarily in Europe. The centre was also being used by the retailing giant Amazon. The software giant had opened the data centre two years ago in Dublin as its directors liked the cool Irish climate. Cooling the massive heat generated by servers which store information constitutes a major percentage of the costs incurred for operating a cloud service. Though a back-up generator would have effortlessly taken over in such a situation, the strike was strong enough to knock out some of those generators and keep the services down for several hours. The services were later manually restarted. Amazon wrote on 7 August at 11:04 p.m. PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) on its Services Health Dashboard, “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of (Elastic Block Storage) EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored … While many volumes will be restored over the next several hours, we anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed.”
Amazon also suffered another outage in Northern Virginia on 8 August when its Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) experienced a service disruption at 7:39 and 7:57 p.m. PDT. These services were, however, restored a little later than 8:00 p.m. PDT.
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