Lightning caused disruptions for users of Amazon’s EC2 could computing platform and Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in Dublin. The lightning caused power outages at the Dublin data centers of Microsoft and Amazon.

According to the Amazon website the lightning stuck a transformer close to the date center causing an explosion and fire. The site reported “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS [Elastic Block Storage] servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored. Restoring these volumes requires that we make an extra copy of all data, which has consumed most spare capacity and slowed our recovery process."

Microsoft reported, on their Twitter feed, that its BPOS services were coming back online for customers.

A number of multinational software firms, such as Microsoft, Amazon and EMC, carry out cloud computing activities in Dublin. Many indigenous software firms have also entered the sector.

Microsoft have estimated that by 2014 the industry of cloud computing will be worth $13.6 billion (€9.5 billion) and  will employ 8,600 people.