Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really)

The Register has details on a recent EC2 outage that is being blamed on a lightning strike that zapped a power distribution unit of the data center. The interruption only lasted around 6 hours, but the irony should last much longer. "While Amazon was correcting the problem, it told customers they had the option of launching new server instances to replace those that went down. But customers were also able to wait for their original instances to come back up after power was restored to the hardware in question."

Struck the cloud, eh?

[BorgCopyeditor]

Did it leave a silver lining?

Re:Irony?

[evanbd]

Perhaps that's the problem. I think lightning rods are supposed to be more coppery than irony.

Well, now that that's over with....

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing to worry about, because as we all know, Lightning never strikes twice.

Yay for savings on the surge protectors!

God here...

[Deus.1.01]

Is the message clear?

-RMS

Re:What irony?

[mail2345]

I think the poster means popular irony, not irony as it actually means. Popular irony is like getting a fly in your white wine. Regular irony is not wearing your tin foil hat on the one day someone actually does beam thoughts into your brain.

Re:Well, now that that's over with....

[Lord Fury]

It's only that lightning never strikes only twice. There's nothing stopping you from getting hit more than twice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan [wikipedia.org]

Re:What irony?

[ZorbaTHut]

In Soviet Russia, clouds get hit by lightning?

Yeah, it's sorta weak, but that's what they were going for.

Re:What irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regular irony is not wearing your tin foil hat on the one day someone actually does beam thoughts into your brain.

Nope. You've still got it wrong... That's still Morissette irony.

Re:What irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real irony here is that tinfoil hats are actually required in order to beam thoughts into your head...

Re:Lightning once striked my friends house.

[Kotoku]

In the civilized world, we just call those "walk through holes" doors.

Having taken weather and climate 101...

[turing_m]

This is clearly a case of cloud-to-cloud lightning.

Re:Irony?

[drinkypoo]

Sometimes we all need to tone back the nerd a bit :)

What? Get out. *points*

Re:Irony?

[MadnessASAP]

Well as it just so happens most lightning is ground to cloud or cloud to cloud with very little cloud to ground.

My nerdiness goes up to 11 by the way.