InternetStormy Weather for Amazon's Cloud Storage

Brief downtime hits the company's S3 service again.

Amazon's S3 service ran into some stormy weather on Sunday when technical glitches knocked the company's "cloud" storage offline for several hours. The company's service -- also known as "Simple Storage Service" -- offers storage hosted "in the cloud", on Amazon's servers. But the service went offline for three hours when, communication problems among S3's hosts prohibited the servers from interacting properly, spokespeople said. To restore service, Amazon was forced to take the entire system offline to restore communication aspects and then re-launch it several hours later, an Amazon spokeswoman told InternetNews.com. She added that further details of the problem would be forthcoming. RELATED ARTICLES Amazon Stretches Elastic Computer Cloud Amazon Mum on S3 Overload Fixes EMC Links Cloud Storage, Hard Drives For more stories on this topic: "These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to root cause in such a situation," she said. "We will be providing our customers with more information when we've fully investigated the incident. We're proud of our operational performance but any downtime is unacceptable and we won't be satisfied until it is perfect." While its technicians were working to restore service, Amazon provided frequent updates on its Service Health Dashboard Web site -- a change from how it handled matters during the service's earlier outage in February. The... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]

InternetBSkyB signs Universal for online music service (Reuters)

Reuters - Britain's largest pay-TV firm BSkyB is to launch an online subscription music service and has signed the world's largest music group Universal as its first partner, in a deal that could challenge Apple.

InternetHow Safe Are Your 'Tweens' Online? (PC Magazine)

PC Magazine - Parents are making an effort to talk to their kids about Internet safety, but kids are still willing to talk to strangers on IM, post personal information about themselves on social networking sites, or be the target of online bullying, according to a Tuesday study.