Amazon Web Services details what caused a roughly four-hour service disruption at its Northern Virginia site.
Amazon offered up more answers Thursday about what caused a bunch of websites to fail two days ago.
According to a postmortem by the company’s cloud services business , around 9:37 a.m. PT Tuesday an Amazon worker incorrectly punched in a command while trying to debug an issue. That command shut down a large set of servers at Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia site, causing a domino effect of problems.
Other services that relied on those S3 cloud storage servers were disrupted. Also, removing so much server capacity required a full system restart, which then took longer than expected, AWS said. The sites affected included Quora, Imgur, IFTTT, Giphy and Slack.
Amazon was able to fix the issue by about 2 p.m. PT.
The problem highlighted just how much of the internet now depends on AWS, the leading cloud service provider, and the major repercussions of even a small human error at AWS.
