Amazon computing Web service suffers glitch

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.

A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.

It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on new hosted computing services, which many software developers are using because of the low up-front costs and simplicity.

Although there has been talk of utility computing for years from the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems, Amazon is increasingly recognized as a leader in the field.

Google is rumored to be making an announcement on Monday of hosted database services around Bigtable, which my CNET News.com colleague Dan Farber described here. Microsoft, too, is expected to offer more of these sorts of services as well around its Live development services.

Customers of an Amazon Web Services support forum lauded Amazon for providing regular feedback on the company's efforts to resolve the problems. A representative of Amazon also said it would hold an investigation to get more details on what caused the problem.