Near the Amazon data center a pillar fell: fifth downtime in a week

On Tuesday, one of the data centers of Amazon completely lost power because of the fact that near the building a car accidentally crashed into a pole and damaged the power line. Unfortunately, switching to power from the generators did not work as it should, and as a result, the EC2 servers were de-energized for some time. Reportedly, for some customers from the east coast of the United States, downtime lasted for more than an hour. This is the fifth (!) Failure of Amazon EC2 over the past week.

The details of the incident are also very curious. The fact is that at first the power normally switched to the generators, but a powerful impulse to the ground near the data center occurred from the fallen column, and a safety sensor triggered from it, which should monitor problems with grounding inside the data center. Due to the erroneous sensor triggering, the security system instantly de-energized the building automatically to protect the equipment.