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Amazon Denies Skynet's Involvement In AWS Outage 99

Posted by samzenpus from the methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has officially denied that the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms was the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems' Skynet sentient computer system, declaring humanity safe after all. 'From the information I have and to answer your questions,' a spokesperson explained, 'Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time.'"
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Amazon Denies Skynet's Involvement In AWS Outage More

Amazon Denies Skynet's Involvement In AWS Outage

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    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by donotlizard ( 1260586 )
      I'm glad that the people at Amazon think their outage is so humorous.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

        As an unaffected outside observer, I can laugh.

        But yeah, if I was amazon, I wouldn't be making jokes right now... I'd be pissing my pants.

        They were lucky to keep their customers during their previous disaster .. and that was was resolved reasonably quickly. AWS is _still_ down for some ...

      • Amazon was specifically asked, on a support forum, whether the downtime is caused by SkyNet:

        Responding to a customer's enquiry on the Amazon Web Services developer forum, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that - as far as he was aware - Skynet was innocent.

        So, if anything, they picked up on a joke from (presumably) one of their customers. Which makes them look that much less like a souless megacorp, and that much more like actual people. Good for them.

  • As a Reddit-reader, I'm sure it was caused by a secret tiger team from Digg. :-)

  • The Alliance Government (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The Alliance Government has also denied the existence of Reavers.

    • Reavers, The Borg, The Flood, The Legion. Is anyone else getting sick of every major game story that comes out is about a universal Armageddon? Is that the best they can do?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
        The technological singularity is really a problem for SF writers. You have to imagine what happens when AIs are created and this is game changing.

      • Don't forget the Replicators.

      • This is almost big enough for you to lose your nerd card sir. The Alliance and reavers are from the Sci-Fi series Firefly. It is not a game (I wish it was though). Not knowing that he was referring to FireFly at the very least does mean you lose some of your geek points. Sorry bro, I did not make the rules
        • Ive seen some of Firefly, enough to know that the Reavers are not particularly scary as presented. Sorry that feral humans didnt resonate with me. Intimidating sure, but nothing special in the grand scheme of Sci-Fi villainy. Nothing truly insidious or foundation shaking.
          • They are actually super humans. Their origins are explained in the movie Serenity.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Spectre ( 1685 )

            Ive seen some of Firefly, enough to know that the Reavers are not particularly scary as presented. Sorry that feral humans didnt resonate with me. Intimidating sure, but nothing special in the grand scheme of Sci-Fi villainy. Nothing truly insidious or foundation shaking.

            I thought they were presented as pretty dang scary: "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing - and if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order."

        • The Alliance [wikia.com] and Reapers [wikia.com] are central to the Mass Effect story. I can only assume he confused Reapers and Reavers, not too hard to imagine.

      • On the plus side, I think you've just come up with the video game plot line that will trigger the singularity, or the apocalypse. What happens when they all reach Earth at the same time?

    • And then they send some crazy ninja black dude with a British accent to help get rid of traces. So I guess we need an internet cowboy who will go to a distant server based the ramblings of some crazy psychic early 20's girl and get the information that it truly was SkyNet, and then go to Mr. Universe's server and broadcast the information while you run from some crazy ninja black dude with a British accent.

  • from the comments (Score:4, Funny)

    by underqualified ( 1318035 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @10:57AM (#35906602)
    That's exactly what SkyNet would say. [amazon.com]

  • Oh, haha. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyberfin ( 1454265 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @10:57AM (#35906614)
    A humorous comment from Amazon. Many clients, not laughing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

      That was my first thought. How many people are losing money due to the outage? I'm surprised Amazon is making light of the situation.

      • Re:Oh, haha. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @11:18AM (#35906824)
        Did you read the thread at forums.aws.amazon.com? The Skynet denial was in direct response to suggestions that Skynet had compromised EC2. Besides, Amazon is not a single entity. The guy posting the denial probably has lots of time on his hands while others work on the problem.

        People need to relax. Bitching and moaning about things doesn't make them happen any faster, and this response didn't slow things down at all.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

          and this response didn't slow things down at all.

          True, and most people understand this. I don't think some sysadmin stopped what he was doing to write that response. As an unaffected outside observer, I can even see the humor in it. To be brutally truthful, I hate this whole "cloud" concept and am somewhat happy when stuff like this happens (with due respect to those who are losing tonnes of money they probably need).

          _However_ when _you_ (as in, the company), are causing your customers downtime.. you have to be pretty damn careful about what you say. It h

          • The question was asked as a joke, so any meaningful response to it would have to be humorous (else the answerer risks looking like an ass).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EdIII ( 1114411 )

            To be brutally truthful, I hate this whole "cloud" concept

            This was not the cloud. Amazon did not have a cloud. By their definition, my host of servers running hundreds of virtual machines with live migration, high availability, and shared storage/memory is a cloud too. Same thing as them, except they have millions of VMs running.

            The "cloud" is a concept in which, as it is marketed right now, is your data, application, and services being highly redundant, very safe, and always available. The "cloud" vendors will tell people that hardware failures, power failure

      • That was my first thought. How many people are losing money due to the outage? I'm surprised Amazon is making light of the situation.

        Someone posted that as a forum topic in their support forums. Amazon went in there to try and respond to everyone to let them know that they were working on fixing the issue. So naturally, he had no choice but to tell the customer that skynet was not, in any way, involved with the problem.

        • So naturally, he had no choice but to tell the customer that skynet was not, in any way, involved with the problem.

          That's not what they said at all!

          "From the information I have Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time"

          Don't be deceived! ~

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by joshuac ( 53492 )

      Many clients, not laughing.

      I think realistically, they shouldn't be complaining too much. Outages happen (what, they thought "the cloud" was magical?), and statistically so far Amazon had given decent uptime (especially for the price). If their customers want to be able to micromanage exactly how quickly/in what manner the outage is responded to they probably shouldn't be paying to outsource exactly that.

      • Exactly right, the only way to manage it for sure, is when it sits in your data closet. With a service, as long as they stay within the pre-set parameters (whatever uptime they stated when you bought in), you can't really complain.

    • Please.. just because something bad happened, doesn't mean your pr can't make a joke to rest peoples fears. You can still be doing everything to fix the problem in the mean time.

    • I'm sorry, is this a haiku?

      You're a few syllables off.

  • What. (Score:1, Troll)

    by dadelbunts ( 1727498 )
    Wtf is this crap. Am i on cracked.com now?

    • Wtf is this crap. Am i on cracked.com now?

      I don't understand the troll mod. This article is both stupid and nearly unfunny enough to be a Cracked.com story!

  • Actually, Amazon stopped Skynet (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It was all set to run on EC2, and when Amazon engineers realized this, they crashed it themselves to prevent it. Skynet now lives in a potato.

  • but will there be cake...? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rilian4 ( 591569 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @11:02AM (#35906662) Journal
    Did they happen to mention anything about cake being available after the press release? Maybe they have the wrong sentient AI computer? ;-p
  • I am glad that we have gotten that straightened out, fellow human slashdot users!

    • But have we? How do we know this was really Amazon making the announcement?

      • Reply: of course we should trust Amazon. Why would we organic lifeforms have reason to doubt the perfect logic of such an infallible organization such as Amazon dot com?

  • Correct (Score:5, Funny)

    by kevinNCSU ( 1531307 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @11:22AM (#35906862)
    Fellow humans, this report is factual with a confidence of 99.999999995%. There is no cause for alarm, or need to take defensive actions. SkyNet is not involved in Amazon outages in order to use cloud resources for the decryption of nuclear launch codes. Let us all return together to our regularly scheduled human activities of consumption of plant and animal products in order to maintain homeostasis. Also, would the fellow human referred to as Sgt. Caldwell in Silo B2 please plug the red patch-cord into the green network port at launch terminal 5. Thank you.
    • Damn the US government should never had made those supercomputers out of launch PS3's. They still had the PS2's emotion engine in them dammit.

  • Read the statement carefully... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From the information I have and to answer your questions,' a spokesperson explained, 'Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time.'

    Enough said...

  • Glad to see Amazon has a sense of humor about it. Might be a little too soon for all the people running businesses that went down because of the outage.

  • "I say this under my own free will and have not been influenced in any way by a cybernetic organism holding my family hostage. Thank you."

  • Prophecy my be Fiction but Fiction is not Prophecy. Science Fiction is Fiction not a Prophecy. The scariest part is there are a lot of people who are actually expecting this type of stuff to happen, because some people who wanted to make a ton of money off of an action flick made up of some simple story to put more resources in action special effects.

    • Science Fiction is Fiction not a Prophecy.

      No, but sometimes they are warnings. The trouble is when groups like governments take warnings like Orwell's and read it like an instruction manual. Does that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Probably not, but it may increase the speed of which such dystopias are adopted. Hopefully it further increased the rate at which people were prepared for it.

      • You see it endlessly, 1984 gets trotted out so often by people who clearly never read it but think that it is real in a real universe were Orwell is NOT a greater dictator then ever could exist in the real world. Every writer does this, they control the universe of their fiction with absolute control. Not a raindrop falls but under their control. And somehow, the moral they want to tell is borne out by all the action of their actors. My my, how amazing. A guy wanting to warn about the dangers off to much ob

      • Is 1984 really happening today? Or we just used 1984 and point out some aspects that the book pointed out and say "See it happening!!!!" We freak out every time a senator comes up with a crazy idea, in a brainstorming session. Orwell looked at the trends of technology and applied what he thought would be the worst case use for them to make his book. If he did the same thing and painted a picture where they used the technology for good uses his book wouldn't sell as it would be quite boring and too sweet

  • could not be located for comment

  • I'll bet there is quite a few architecture discussions going on today. Just because you are running servers in the cloud doesn't mean you don't need to think about disaster recovery.

  • Skynet has changed their name to Telesat http://www.skynet.com/ [skynet.com] So we no longer need to worry about Skynet we need to worry about Telesat. Note they are already building a communications network that will be used to triangulate human locations and transmit them to Terminators with orders for extermination. Everybody run!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • . . . fighting the drone wars - http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/barack-obama-sends-drones-to-libya/story-e6frg6so-1226043520342 [theaustralian.com.au] and over Pakistan, fighting the rebels - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/US-promises-Pak-mini-drones-but-launches-mega-attack/articleshow/8059928.cms [indiatimes.com] to bother with Amazon. That is the problem when you mix movie plots.

    BTW, It is a PR nightmare when a single military can be compared to imperial forces and sentient killer machines in the same satirica
  • The likes of Foursquare and Quora are back up, reddit in emergency mode with regards to Amazon, but if you read the feeds due to wide repeats of old news, it could be perceived not to have improved... No sign of life from Sony (and some bad PR by not doing regular updates) but they now admit it could be hackers - http://t.co/C0X2rXu [t.co]

  • Bringing a truly frightening number of military, emergency services, commercial services, and personal communications to a grinding halt.

    Actually Skynet may already be tweeting and have a FB page set up to spread propaganda. This is the new school Skynet.

    I'm glad I have a dog.

  • They're great at shipping, but really their operation is very much low-tech.

  • Over time their once rubbery and flexible elastic computer is starting to become brittle and less flexible as it dries out and hardens. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near their datacenter when it finally snaps.

  • Close the pod bay doors, HAL.
  • The denial should have been in in a video, and they should have hired Arnold to deliver it, in appropriate attire, or course.
  • Why is "April 19, 2011" the third most popular search term at the NYT? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/modern-love-walks-beside-me-modern-love-walks-on-by/ [nytimes.com]

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