Power failures, etc

[Andre Kesteloot]

Tacoistas,

In April 2012, some of Amazon's servers went down. (the reliable "cloud " ?)
Their explanation is --to my mind-- incredible.
Written, of course, in the passive form. ("a breaker was incorrectly 
configured"  as opposed to "the technicians of company XYZ wrongly 
configured a breaker", etc)
We need to know the name of the Engineer who designed this thing, and 
clearly never tested it.

André N4ICK

********************************

Last week some of Amazon's servers went down. This was their
explanation for what happened:

/"At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high
voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations
that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the
entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2
instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up
generator power. At 8:53PM PDT, one of the generators overheated and
powered off because of a defective cooling fan. At this point, the EC2
instances and EBS volumes supported by this generator failed over to
their secondary back-up power (which is provided by a completely
separate power distribution circuit complete with additional generator
capacity). Unfortunately, one of the breakers on this particular
back-up power distribution circuit was incorrectly configured to open
at too low a power threshold and opened when the load transferred to
this circuit. After this circuit breaker opened at 8:57PM PDT, the
affected instances and volumes were left without primary, back-up, or
secondary back-up power."/


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