Amazon confirms cloud services are back

Amazon's cloud computing services have returned to normal, following significant disruptions, the firm confirmed on its Web Services Health Dashboard.

We reported earlier in April Amazon's online cloud computing services had experienced some major outages, which in turn caused a considerable headache for many sites and online businesses, including Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and Hootsuite.

The outages affected the Elastic Compute Cloud service (EC2,) as well as Amazon's Relational Database Service over a period of several days.

However, whilst Amazon said most user data should now be restored, it also suggested around 0.07 per cent of data volumes in its Eastern US databanks may "not be fully recoverable," and has stated it will be contacting and working closely with affected customers to restore as much as possible.

Commentators cited the outages as an uncomfortable lesson for Amazon, its clientele and the industry as a whole in the potential pitfalls of cloud computing. In many cases it seemed the worst affected were those who treated the service as a primary storage resource with few, if any, backup measures.

The incident was less of a concern for the big name sites affected but far more pressing for businesses whose online presence via Amazon's cloud provides their primary cash flow.

The event essentially halted their operations for an extended period while Amazon struggled to fix the problem.

A big concern for some throughout the incident was Amazon's lack of communication, though the company has since tried to reassure customers by announcing intentions to launch an in-depth investigation into the outages with a full report to follow.