I think the Amazon AWS outage generated the most buzz. There were some great discussions here on Focus and even a round-table on it earlier this year.

http://www.focus.com/search/?q=AWS+outage

In all, I think it helped to settle down some of the frenzy around "the cloud" and help decision makers who were paying attention gain a sober appreciation for the risks that accompany the benefits of cloud adoption.

For more technical types, the post-mortem http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/ revealed just how fragile the service was under the hood. A relatively simple network error (which had happened before with smaller impact) ended up causing a chain reaction that led to service interruptions and degradation lasting up to 48. Some data (a relatively small amount) was unrecoverable.

In my opinion, Amazon did a good job of laying out the details and causes of the event. Their response provided a level of transparency that was not available before the outage. However, that transparency also revealed architectural and design weaknesses in the system that are not likely to be corrected easily.

On the business side of the house, the outage brought the issue of recourse to the surface. Customers realized suddenly that if their service was down they not only had no alternative for restoral of service, but they also had weak or non-existent SLAs. At most, they could get a portion of that month’s bill back. This again brought the issue of risk from the distant background to front and center.

J. Robert Dacey

Senior Information Technology Professional, Consultant and Recreational Sage.

Posted on Dec. 7, 2011

I have to lean towards the Blackberry outage in October: Global in nature, front page headlines (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/10/blackberry-outage-spreads-to-u-s/) and devastating to RIM as a whole. It may go down as the final straw that broke the hold BB had on Corporate Smartphones …