Last week, Windows Azure cloud struggled.

Today, several availability zones in Amazon AWS US-East region went down i (US-EAST-1). Here is Cedexis Radar detected in real time…

[First edition of this article : 09:50 UTC]

As of Thu Mar 15 09:46:21 UTC 2012, Cedexis Radar has detected what appears to be an outage at 3 of the 4 availability zones (AZs) in Amazon AWS’ US-East region.

The screen shot is of US-East 1A. Our data suggest that the only AZ currently reachable in US-East is 1C. 1A, 1B and 1D appear unavailable.

UPDATE 1: Total outage was around 19 minutes. See second screen shot below.

UPDATE 2: Amazon has confirmed, here’s the current message on Status dashboard.

2:40 AM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region.

3:03 AM PDT Between 2:22 AM and 2:43 AM PST internet connectivity was impaired in the US-EAST-1 region. Full connectivity has been restored. The service is operating normally.

… a great reason to look into a multi-vendor strategy!