Web Hosting Outage

Many businesses were affected by a major outage at the Amazon.com web hosting data center in Virginia on Thursday and Friday. The effects of this service interruption were widespread because Amazon is a major provider of data center hosting for cloud computing services.

Thousands of smaller companies who depend on Amazon to run their website operations, store their business data and keep track of their email service were negatively impacted. A number of well known social media websites like Reddit, Quora, Foursquare and HootSuite were affected by the outage. This incident serves as a lesson to many companies that when it comes to cloud computing it's best to have a good backup plan. Those that didn't lost a full day of business, and it was especially costly for companies that do most of their business via email.