Another Amazon cloud-services outage occurred on Sunday, August 7th in a Dublin, Ireland data center. This one occurred due to a lightning strike that hit a transformer near the Dublin data center. It led to an explosion and fire that knocked out all utility services thereby leading to a total data center outage. Amazon had its only European data center located there.

My initial thoughts are related to disaster recovery and Amazon services. In their last significant outage in April, they had a network configuration change that led to an outage of services in the eastern United States. This outage begs other questions. Why isn't Amazon deploying a redundant power source, like a diesel powered backup? Maybe they did, but the fire blew out a portion of that utility service. So a more serious disaster emerged from an initial transformer explosion.

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