Publishers Weekly’s Web outage
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
A massive Web outage that began in the wee hours of Thurdsay morning continued a day later into Friday. The outage took down the location-based social networking site Foursquare, Hollywood-focused Aint It Cool News, recommendation engine Reddit, independent journalism site Pro Publica, Twitter-app Hootsuite and major publishing industry magazine Publishers Weekly.
The sites were all using Amazon Web services, whose popular cloud-based web service is now coming under question. AllThingsDigital writes, ‘Amazon will have to work extra hard to win back the unquestioning confidence it has so long enjoyed. Meanwhile, competitors like Microsoft Azure, IBM and others will do their best to capitalize on this and lure customers away from Amazon.’
Amazon has been scrambling to get the service back up and running, although its initial Thursday hopes that it would return ‘in a few hours’ was overly optimistic. On Friday, our Technology blog reports, Amazon officials were not available for comment.
While many of these companies, like Fourquare, are at their heart Internet-based businesses, Publishers Weekly is also a print magazine. The print production has not been interrupted and its next issue will appear, as always, on Monday.
Senior Web Editor Craig Teicher says that the website should also be back up and running by then too. It may go live sooner, sometime this weekend.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
