On 1 April, the data center located in Northern Virginia (USA) Amazon Web Services has been a blackout that paralyzed part of Cloud Computing services for 3 hours. According to the monitoring service developed by the group (Health Service Dashboard), break occurred between 4:23 ET. During this period, the APIs of EC2, have been inaccessible, making ineffective communication between the service and applications based there.

Amazon cites errors in deploying an unfortunate update on the platform, which would obviously not included in the testing procedures used, carried out prior to production. This update focused on a layer of control EC2. It also explains why virtual machines are active at the breakdown were not affected, "but users were unable to manage their environment and to enable or disable their servers."

In December 2009, the same data center had also been failure, this time electricity, which had left many companies on the floor for 1 hour. This new failure illustrates the need for providers of platforms for Cloud Computing to provide their clients a SLA (Service Level Agreement). A commitment imperative as more and more companies are planning to switch to a cloud infrastructure, whether private or public, by 2015.