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Kindle sparks Fire, Clouds emerge from Amazon data center

No one was hurt in the making of these AWS puns

A fire has torn through an under-construction Amazon data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, US.

The cloud giant told The Register that no one was hurt in the blaze on Friday, and that there was no disruption to the live Amazon Web Services platform.

"We can confirm that a facility in Northern Virginia that is in the early stages of construction for AWS by a third party, caught fire early this morning," a spokesperson said.

"Thanks to the rapid response from the local fire officials it was quickly extinguished. There were no injuries."

According to CNN, the fire was put out in under an hour after the alarm was raised at 10.12am local time. Builders were working on the site's roof when highly flammable material kindled, we're told, and were able to flee the flames unhurt. Thick plumes of black smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, according to bystanders.

The datacenter was set to house some of Amazon's equipment for the Eastern US portion of the AWS cloud service.

As the facility was not yet operational, don't expect to see any interruption in AWS, although it may delay the expansion of Amazon's service; that the building work was in an early stage suggests there's no major setback, just an embarrassing one.

The Northern Virginia area is a popular area for data centers. Low power costs, favorable tax rates and connectivity to nearby Washington DC have made the place a good pick for new server warehouses. Amazon has various such facilities dotted around the world for redundancy and latency reasons. ®

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