<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Gigaom]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://gigaom.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Barb Darrow]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[http://search.gigaom.com/author/barbdarrow/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Xen security issue prompts Amazon, Rackspace cloud reboots]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are warning their customers of upcoming reboots they&#8217;re taking to address a new <a href="http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/">Xen hypervisor security issue.</a></p>
<p>In <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/maintenance-2015-03/">a premium support bulletin</a> issued Thursday night, Amazon said fewer than 10 percent of all EC2 instances will require work but the affected instances must be updated by March 10. <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/rackspace/">Rackspace</a> also notified customers of the issue, which will affect a subset of a portion of its First and Next Generation Cloud Servers, <a href="https://community.rackspace.com/general/f/53/t/4978">Thursday night</a>. Later on Friday, Linode also <a href="http://status.linode.com/incidents/2dyvn29ds5mz">warned users</a> of an upcoming Xen-related reboot.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re sensing a little bit of deja vu, it&#8217;s because the major cloud players were forced to reboot a bunch of their customers in September due to a Xen hypervisor issue, although <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/09/24/yikes-big-amazon-web-services-reboot-on-the-way/">the reason for the updates </a>was not disclosed <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/09/25/amazon-confirms-that-ec2-reboots-are-due-to-xen-issues/">at first.</a> Last time out, AWS also said 10 percent of its EC2 instances were affected.</p>
<p>Cloud vendors impacted by these security issues tread a tricky path. They have to address the vulnerability as fast as possible before the details of the flaw are made public, which can lead to a bit of a fire drill. In this case, more information about the flaw will be disclosed March 10.</p>
<p>In September, <a href="https://search.gigaom.com/company/amazon/">Amazon</a> was first out of the chute with notifications, followed by Rackspace and then <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/10/01/and-now-its-ibm-softlayers-turn-to-reboot-its-cloud/">IBM Softlayer</a> made its disclosures the following week.</p>
<p><em>Note: This story was updated at 3:49 p.m. PST to note that Linode is also performing system updates.</em></p>
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