A Day of Outages: Amazon, Twitter, Disqus, WinExtra
Today must be one of those days on the net (and it’s not even Friday the 13th yet – that’s next Friday!).
Amazon is still recovering from a large, international outage, Twitter is down and out (like that’s something new – but even istwitterdown.com is down right now, too), Disqus suffered some outages last night, and even my friend Steven Hodson’s WinExtra is offline right now.
I gather this is a good reminder about how cloud computing is prone to suffer these kinds of outages etc. etc. but really, it’s also a good reminder that while we tend to write and talk a lot about the outward, consumer facing side of the web, we do tend to ignore the plumbing behind it all – until it breaks.
I always feel like I’m a control freak when I want to host everything on my own site, but I did give in and install Disqus for comments – the convenience for my readers and for myself just outweighed the cost of a potential problem with Disqus. Even if they shut down at some point, I just turn on the old comment system again and move on.
But then, my email is exclusively on Gmail – and I don’t make backups of it, at all…