Amazon has shared the results of its investigation into the “service disruption” that AWS (and its customers) experienced on Dec. 7.
Amazon has explained why a vital Amazon Web Services (AWS) region, US-East-1, experienced what the company describes as a “service disruption” for about seven hours on Dec.7. The problems with US-East-1 affected many people’s ability to connect to streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video; games like Valorant, League of Legends, and PUBG; apps like Tinder, Venmo, and Coinbase; and many other services that rely on AWS. The sheer popularity of those services makes it relatively easy to tell when AWS is having problems—just try to stream a video, play a game, or use a mobile app connected to the nigh-ubiquitous platform. But it can be much more difficult to figure out why AWS is down. Here’s what Amazon says caused US-East-1’s woes in its summary of the incident: At 7:30 AM PST, an automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network.
