It was a dark and gloomy night in Ireland, home of many transnational corporations. Thunder was in the air, ready to burst into a symphony of lightnings and roar. At the Amazon Data Centre the night shift had just begun and the loyal server wards were patrolling the narrow corridors on their usual rounds. 

The Irish hounds were howling in the distance. The approaching thunder made everyone restless. A stable humming was echoing from the EC2 servers’ chambers. Suddenly, without a warning, a loud bang shook the building and the humming came to a halt. 

A lightning struck an electric transformer. This paralyzed a large number of servers, sadly also those handling most HammerKit sites. Despite of our efforts in restoring the sites asap, the downtime lasted several hours. Everything is however now fixed and sites are working normally. 

We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused. This incident revealed weaknesses in our server setup. It is a valuable learning experience that we will take into account when restructuring the setup to better fit the requirements of our customers. 

Yesterday we witnessed first hand how highly unlikely does not equal impossible.