Lightning Strike in Dublin Downs Amazon, Microsoft Clouds
August 8, 2011 No CommentsA lightening strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power failure in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies’ cloud services to go offline.
Lightening struck a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to knock out some of those generators.