

Global Outage of AWS CloudFront CDN on Nov 26 2014 - sajal83
http://www.turbobytes.com/blog/cloudfront-cdn-global-outage/

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aidos
It's the second time in less than a week that AWS have failed to update their
status page during service disruption and then filed it under 'increased error
rates'.

Don't get me wrong, I love AWS and use it every day, but it's a little
insulting to pretend that things haven't gone wrong when they quite obviously
have.

I know Amazon aren't the most transparent company in the world but why even
bother having a status page if everyone has to turn to twitter to validate the
outage?

Last night while sitting around waiting for cloudfront to come back so I could
get on with my work I turned to HN to give me a bit of reading material. My
word, sooooo many of the articles linked to on the front page were missing
their static assets because of the AWS outage. Would be really interesting to
know what percentage of the internet was affected.

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oneeyedpigeon
Are there independent services that monitor a range of hosting providers, cdn,
etc. and keep a history that can be used for reference? I'm thinking someone
like pingdom could do this.

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lclarkmichalek
[https://cloudharmony.com/](https://cloudharmony.com/) does to some extent,
though it's not exactly what your talking about

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ceejayoz
I'm really freaking tired of the AWS Status page using the green "info" marker
for major outages.

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lxfontes
bottom line: always CNAME your asset domain.

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mikejholly
Totally. We were able to side step the CDN in less than a minute. +1

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Nagyman
That helps! I guess it assumes your origin servers have the capacity to serve
the traffic. Or did you switch CDNs? Just curious as there are services like
Cedexis (or TurboBytes; the author of the article) for load balancing CDNs

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stevenh
This is incredibly upsetting. Amazon publishing false status reports for
public consumption is directly equivalent to libeling every single customer
they have, simultaneously.

I was trying to register a new domain during this outage. When my registrar's
site wasn't loading correctly, I dug around and discovered they use AWS. I
then checked Amazon's AWS status page to see if they were the culprit.

Nothing but green icons across the board.

Amazon having the audacity to tell such a gargantuan lie seemed inconceivable,
so I was absolutely convinced that the problem was the registrar's fault. I
decided the registrar must have become shoddy at some point without me
noticing, and so I made a "to-do" note for myself to switch to another
registrar this weekend.

If I hadn't happened to stumble across this HN submission, the registrar I use
would have lost a long-time customer due to Amazon publishing a maliciously
false status page for AWS.

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EGreg
Is there some way to do a fallback if the DNS server is down?

Also if my host is down can I "quickly" try another host? I know that it's
possible in my own app, but can I tell a browser to do it, as a web publisher?

