Cloud giant
Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage Saturday which brought down a number of websites that are dependent on its services. Sites such as Netflix, SocialFlow, Tinder, AirBnB, Product Hunt, and some of its own Amazon websites, suffered various degrees of outage as a result of AWS’ cloud issues. According to the company, the problems began at its US-EAST-1 public-cloud facility in North Virginia, USA. It was first reported about 6.00 AM Eastern Standard Time.
A range of AWS services were also impacted by the outage. These included its NoSQL database service, DynamoDB; its cloud app monitoring service CloudWatch; and its mobile data storage system, Cognito. The company admitted that the problems forced it to “throttle” services to control the number of requests made to APIs as part of its recovery procedure. Problems at SocialFlow - a social media optimization platform for publishers – had the knock on effect of causing websites that use its URL-shortening services to show “503 error” pages.
The latest problems mirror those that occurred in 2013 when a number of websites were brought down as a result of an AWS outage. That outage was reported as costing in the region of $1,100 per second. Details of the cost of the current outage have not been suggested. A Twitter message from AWS at 11:53 AM Eastern Standard Time suggested “most services seem to be returning to normal”.
Were you impacted by AWS’ issues? Let us know what happened. Add your comments below.
