NEWS ANALYSIS: The now famous type in a server update routine was only one in a chain of factors that brought down Amazon Web Services’ cloud and shut down thousands of sites.
NEWS ANALYSIS: The causes of the massive Amazon Web Services outages that knocked as many as 150,000 websites offline went way beyond a typo in a server command.
You hear about accident investigations on a regular basis. When an airliner goes down, or a train comes off the rails or any other serious accident, an investigation starts along with the grim task of recovering the dead and injured.
Usually, there will be a briefing by the investigating authority at the start and then you won’t hear anything for months. Few people know is what the investigators are even looking for.
That’s because it can take months for the investigators to go through every detail before determining what caused the accident. The investigations are elaborate because there’s rarely a single cause to a serious accident. Eventually the investigation will show that a sequence of events occurred and it’s possible that the accident could have been prevented if any one of those event had changed.
Investigations of this type actually happen for accidents of all sorts, not just transportation catastrophes.
