Some Data Lost in the Amazon Web Services Massive Outage Will Not be Recovered

Amazon's Web Services disaster is over, for the most part, unfortunately it will leave a couple of scars, some in the public perception of the Amazon cloud and cloud technology in general and some quite more tangible since not all storage volumes were recovered after the outage.

"We have completed our remaining recovery efforts and though we've recovered nearly all of the stuck volumes, we've determined that a small number of volumes (0.07% of the volumes in our US-East Region) will not be fully recoverable," Amazon said in one of its last status updates covering the outage.

Finally, yesterday, Amazon announced that the problems, which lasted for six days or so, were over and that it will be revealing more details soon.

"We're closing this thread out by telling you that the team is working very diligently on the root causes and learnings from this event, and will share the post mortem shortly," Amazon wrote.

That post mortem is still in the waiting as Amazon hasn't said much about why the outage happened in the first place. This, in fact, has been one of the biggest criticisms, the lack of information coming from Amazon during a time when entire businesses and large websites were brought to a halt.

The problems began last Thursday when customers using one particular Amazon Web Services data center were unable to access their Elastic Blog Storage volumes and later when EC2 instances hosted in the same region became inaccessible.

This brought down large site such as Reddit, FourSquare and Quora. As the hours turned to days, Amazon did provide some info on its status page, but it took a long time for any meaningful information to start being released. Even then, there weren't many details.

Most problems were fixed fast enough, most availability zones, virtual data centers of sorts that are supposed to be isolated from each other, were brought back online soon, but issues with one availability zone lingered.

The team worked to recover the data and most of it was available again by Sunday. The next day though, Amazon announced that some data, 0.07 percent of the volumes in the entire US-East Region would not be recovered.

It's a small percentage, but it could mean quite a lot of data is lost forever. Amazon will provide more details once it's done with the analysis of the problems, but it has to answer quite a lot of questions to regain the trust of some of its users.