Computerworld: On Sunday, lightning struck a transformer in Dublin, knocking Amazon Web Services at the data center located there offline. Normally, backup generators would kick in after a power outage, but the blast also damaged those generators. As a result, many European users of Amazon’s cloud computing services like EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) were unable to access those services for many hours. At 11:04 PM PDT on Sunday evening, the company announced, “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of 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.”
European users of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite also experienced outages after the lightning strike.
