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Lightning has struck the cloud. Amazon and Microsoft data centers in Dublin, Ireland were hit by a lightning strike on Sunday, resulting in temporary outages for customers who rely on cloud services provided by the companies. According to Data Center Knowledge, Amazon has reported that the strike resulted in an explosion, succeeding in disabling generators at the site.

Concerning Amazon Web Services, it appears that the outages mostly pertained to Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Yesterday regarding the recovery process for Elastic Compute, Amazon Web Services stated, “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored.” Later on the company reported that it was making progress.

Concerning CloudWatch, AWS stated, “CloudWatch metrics are operating normally for all recovered instances in the affected Availability Zone. Metrics from instances still recovering from the power loss in the affected Availability Zone are still delayed.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft provided some information concerning its problems through its Twitter page, reporting service recoveries for BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite). BPOS provides communication services to various businesses.

Amazon Web Services was hit by a previous outage in April, although that outage was quite different. It was apparently due to an incorrect traffic shift during an upgrade on the AWS network. April’s outage resulted in technical issues for sites that rely on AWS, including the likes of HootSuite and Quora. Following up after the recovery, AWS worked to improve its network.

Cloud computing has commonly been seen as an efficiently reliable way of storing various types of data. Cloud users range from large companies storing information in the cloud to common consumers who use services to store personal multimedia files such as music.