Amazon has been a company that does two things well: it gets the web (it has one of the best optimized websites on the web and at one time it was beating Google). And it gets branding.
It has, as a result, parlayed its strengths into a multi-billion empire which also offers web services. Amazon Web Services rents out computers and data storage space on as-you-need basis competing against dedicated hosting companies Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure. As such they rely on the same style infrastructure with large data centres spread across different locations in order to provide reliability for their end users.
That reliability has come into question following a mysterious failure in a data centre in North Virginia which caused ripples across the Amazon capacity. As a result social site, Foursquare, which uses the Amazon service, started to experience outages while another social network service, HootSuite, which provides a Twitter feed dashboard went offline as did questions-and-answers website, Quora.
Amazon’s market lead has so far been provided by the fact that its normally super-reliable service has been accessible by anyone with a credit card. It will be interesting to see what effect this widespread problem will have on their reputation and market share.
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