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BitBucket, a major host of Mercurial repositories, experienced a major outage on October 2nd, preventing many users from accessing their online code repositories (thank goodness for DVCS). The situation has drawn the interest of many on the web because BitBucket is hosted on Amazon’s cloud computing services, EC2 and EBS. Indeed, this highlights one of the significant drawbacks of cloud computing services in that when things go wrong, direct access to your systems infrastructure simply isn’t possible. BitBucket wrangled with Amazon sales representatives and engineers to get them to admit there was a problem on Amazon’s side, which turned out to be a flood of UDP packets consuming all available bandwidth.

More can be read about the story in a BitBucket blog post found here.