Amazon AWS outage leads to data loss for customers

Amazon AWS recently had an outage which led to loss of data for various customers. On August 31, 2019, an Amazon AWS US-EAST-1 data center in North Virginia experienced an outage at 4:33 AM.

This outage in the datacenter led to loss of 7.5% of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes. After the restoration of power, Amazon determined that some of the EC2 instances and EBS volumes suffered hardware damage which led to data losses. This data loss can be lethal for organizations and individuals.

Programmer and Author Andy Hunt was the one who reported this AWS error as he was one of the victims who suffered data loss. Andy reported that Amazon took nearly four days to figure out and notify it's users about the whole scenario. Hunt had a secondary backup of his data and is safe from data loss, but for the users with no backup, this loss can be disastrous.

Amazon EBS advertises itself as being "designed to protect against failures by replicating within the Availability Zone (AZ), offering 99.999% availability and an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1%-0.2%. ".

Data Loss and failures do happen even in Cloud, against what is advertised.

NPAV recommends you to install NPAV Z-Security which has multiple layers of local, LAN and cloud backup solutions.