Amazon Finds the Cause of Its AWS Outage: A Typo
March 02 2017 - 5:05PM
Dow Jones News
By Laura Stevens
Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday blamed human error for an outage at
its cloud-services unit that caused widespread disruption to
internet traffic across the U.S. earlier this week.
In a post on its website, Amazon said the outage started with a
typo at Amazon's North Virginia data centers Tuesday.
An employee trying to speed up the company's S3 cloud-storage
billing system tried to take a few servers offline. The employee
mistyped the command, however, affecting more servers than
intended, which led to a cascade of failures that ultimately
knocked out S3 and other Amazon services. It also took longer than
expected to restart certain services, Amazon said.
Amazon said it is adding safeguards to prevent server capacity
from falling too quickly or below a minimum level.
Amazon Web Services, the largest global seller of cloud
infrastructure, has more than a million users. The hourslong outage
Tuesday disabled and slowed apps and websites from a wide section
of U.S. companies, including Quora Inc., Slack Technologies Inc.
and Medium.com Inc.
The AWS outage cost companies in the S&P 500 index $150
million, according to Cyence Inc., a startup that specializes in
estimating cyberrisks. Apica Inc., a website-monitoring company,
said 54 of the internet's top 100 retailers saw website performance
slow by 20% or more.
Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 02, 2017 16:50 ET (21:50 GMT)
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