Amazon denies Skynet involvement in cloud outage
Claims genocidal AI not to blame for website downtime

Written by Gareth Halfacree on 22 April, 2011
Amazon denies Skynet involvement in cloud outage | thinq_

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.

Yesterday's outage, which took down the image storage services for a raft of major websites including question-and-answer site Quora, location-based social network Foursquare, and Twitter app Hootsuite, was noted by some to come on the day that Terminator TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles claimed would herald the start of Skynet's war against humanity.

While the original film had the artificial intelligence, installed to take control of the US military arsenal, reach self-awareness on the 29th of August 1997, the TV re-imagining of the tale takes place in an alternate timeline where Skynet didn't run off the rails until the 21st of April 2011.

The coincidental timing of the Amazon cloud storage outage and Skynet's supposed attack against humanity didn't go unnoticed - but Amazon has acted quickly to reassure humanity that a simple lack of adequate peak storage capacity, rather than a genocidal AI, was responsible for the failure.

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

With Skynet exonerated and the AWS platform returned to its fully operational state, the war against the machines appears to have been postponed - for now, at least.

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"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

Personally, I'm rooting for Skynet...

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