A Stormy Week for Cloud Computing, Too

Tech investors can't catch a break. Akamai Technologies (NAS: AKAM) and Amazon.com (NAS: AMZN) suffered unrelated but nonetheless noticeable outages last night, highlighting (lowlighting?) a week that's already featured far too many crashes.

Neither incident was serious. Analyst Dan Rayburn said in a blog post that Akamai's outage lasted roughly 30 minutes on Monday and affected major clients, such as Apple (NAS: AAPL) . A configuration change to some servers in the company's content delivery network (CDN) set off a chain reaction, prompting Akamai to revert to the original settings.

Amazon, for its part, also suffered an outage on Monday night, the cause of which wasn't immediately clear. Rayburn says the company's EC2 network -- which has failed multiple times this year -- went down for 45 minutes, affecting Netflix (NAS: NFLX) , among others.

On their own, these outages don't mean much. But taken together and combined with moves by AT&T (NYS: T) , Comcast (NAS: CMCSA) , and Verizon (NYS: VZ) to limit users' bandwidth consumption, the outages once more bring into sharp relief the need to upgrade the basic backbone of the Internet. At this pace, it won't be long before users are consuming data faster than the Web's delivery boys (CDNs, carriers, etc.) can deliver it.

Do you agree? Disagree? Weigh in using the comments box below. And if you'd like to get a better feel for the cloud-computing opportunity, try this free video. You'll walk away with a better understanding of how the Web is changing entire industries and a winning pick from our Motley Fool Rule Breakers scorecard. Watch now -- it's 100% free.

At the time thisarticle was published Fool contributorTim Beyersis a member of theMotley Fool Rule Breakersstock-picking team. He owned shares of Akamai and Apple at the time of publication. Check out Tim'sportfolio holdingsandFoolish writings, or connect with him onGoogle+or Twitter, where he goes by@milehighfool. You can also get his insightsdelivered directly to your RSS reader.The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple.Motley Fool newsletter serviceshave recommended buying shares of Amazon.com, Netflix, Apple, and AT&T, formerly recommended Akamai Technologies, and still recommended creating a bull call spread position in Apple and buying puts in Netflix. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools don't all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.

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