How an oversight of this magnitude appears for what I would consider is a mission critical platform like Cloud Storage is beyond my basic comprehension. It will be interesting to see what the blow back will be and how the Technology Press reports (or if they report) on this. As of right now I’ve only seen a handful of tweets about customers not being able to access the platform or having issues with their storage. I’ll be curious to see how quickly they can get this back up, honestly it shouldn’t be taking more than an hour if that, but almost 1 hour 10 minutes into this and its still a problem.

The service dashboard is still showing many areas with problems.

This comes on the heels of some breathless reporting earlier this week about Azure taking over from Amazon in the storage arena.  Microsoft Azure pips Amazon as king of cloud storage. Let me hazard a guess that the title of “king” might be changing hands soon. And because everyone loves a good laugh, file this under poorly timed tweets:

Edited: 8:08PM PST: a full 6 hours after I posted this and Current Status:

Storage is currently experiencing a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate. HTTP traffic is not impacted. We are validating the recovery options before implementing them. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers. Status of affected services will be updated in  the table below.

Ouch. This is why the storage “Cloud” isn’t ready for prime time. If something as simple as an SSL cert expiration can bring down a global platform, the true Enterprise will not trust it, in fact even the SMB-Mid market won’t. Then again, it depends on what you are putting up there to begin with. Is it just tertiary storage for long term retention or is it something mission critical? If its the latter, sucks to be you.

For those of us who work in the Enterprise IT arena, and have to deal with the end user space, its a very tough sell when it comes to pushing cloud solutions that have not been tested over time. And while the technical press might focus on something like “performance”, I’d rather wager my reputation on longevity and consistency. Not ready for prime time might be a better way to look at it, or good enough for things that won’t cripple my cash flow may be better.