Some of you may well know that Amazon's cloud storage system EC2 went down last week, what many of you might not know is it went down on the very day that Terminator TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles claimed Skynet would become self aware and start a war against humanity.
So was Amazon under attack from Skynet and had computer AI become self aware ?
Well according to Amazon the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms were not the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems’ Skynet.
Last weeks 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.
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.