AWS Downtime

AWS today suffered another serious span of downtime for a large degree of AWS customers (EC2, S3, etc!). The downtime lasted around 35 minutes meaning thousands of websites were knocked offline. If you host your website on one of the Amazon services and didn’t notice this downtime then maybe it’s time to setup website monitoring?

So what can you do when AWS goes down – after all it’s outside of your control isn’t it? Partly yes – you could have backups in place and switch over to another server but realistically one of the best routes you can take when AWS goes down is to let your customers know you are aware of the issue.

People are understanding of downtime as long as they are kept informed. If your site or application goes down because of an AWS failure the first thing you should do is get onto social networks look reactive. Let people know what the cause of the issue is and if possible give a rough estimate of how long you expect it to be down for.

Protecting your brand through downtime is easy but you need to be one of the first people to find out about the downtime – you don’t want to seem slow to react or even worse unaware of downtime caused by AWS. There is a huge range of website monitoring services you can use to ensure you get alerted quickly and effortlessly, for example our service(which you can use for free!)