Netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram may be sticking with Amazon's cloud after last weekend's outage, but for Brandon Wade's online dating site, the Friday night crash was the last straw. He's going off of Amazon now. After two outages in June, he says Amazon is simply not reliable enough for romance.
The paying users of his website, Whatsyourprice.com, are "very impatient, and relatively intolerant of such failures," he says. "Some people's lives were interrupted in a big way."
Wade's relatively small operation -- they boast 400,000 users -- is the only company to publicly drop Amazon after last week's outage. But the incident left Amazon -- and its reputation as a professional manager of constantly available computing services -- tarnished.
For Whatsyourprice.com, it was a repeat of June 14. Wade -- who has been hosting his site on Amazon's cloud for a year and a half -- knew his site was in trouble when his pager started buzzing around 10 p.m. that Thursday. Then came the text messages. Then the angry e-mails: about 1,000 per hour.
"I have a date tonight and can't log onto your website," wrote one user within minutes of the outage. "Seriously? Can you at least give me her phone number?"
The site lets guys connect with attractive women and then pay them for dates. (Before you ask, Wade says it's really not prostitution; it's just money changing hands for dates). When it goes down, people get mad.
And unfortunately for Amazon, the outages happened on a Thursday and a Friday -- prime weekend pay-for-date-planning time.
"That's when people go out on dates," Wade says. "I think the impact would have been less if it had happened in the middle of the week."
Amazon acknowledged a brief outage in mid-June, but its real problems started when violent storms cut power to two of its Virginia data centers last Friday. Batteries and backup generators kept the power flowing to one of the data centers, but a second one went offline for about 20 minutes before generators fully brought back the juice.
That, in turn, caused other problems for Amazon customers as some of its web services -- most notably the load-balancing service used to move around programming jobs -- became gummed up in the buggy aftermath of the power outage. Netflix went down for several hours, as did Instagram and Pinterest.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on this story, but the company apologized on Tuesday for the incident. "We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses," Amazon said, adding that it will, "do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services."
That apology and explanation didn't satisfy Wade, who is now moving his website to a pair of local hosting providers. He thinks that Amazon could have done a better job testing its backup generators, which were last tested about six weeks before the June 29 storm.
"Obviously, with such outages you can do a lot of stress testing to plan for these sort of incidents," he says. "Natural disasters are bound to happen, and If you architect your solutions properly, you should be able to take into account all of these possibilities."
Wade may blame Amazon, but for many of his daters, it's too late. The stakes are simply too high. "Signed up this morning. Cancelling tonight," wrote another user after the June 14 outage. "Thanks for keeping me single."
