AWS services recover after daylong outage hits major sites

Source Credit : CNBC

Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday that took down numerous major websites

Many sites came back online within a few hours, although Downdetector showed another spike in user reports around noon ET of outages at Amazon, AWS and Alexa.

The company’s latest update at 6:53 p.m. ET noted that “all AWS services returned to normal operations” shortly after 6 p.m. ET.

Some services continue to have a backlog of messages that will finish processing in the next few hours, AWS said.

“We will share a detailed AWS post-event summary,” the company said in the note.

The update came after outages and delays persisted into Monday afternoon, with the company observing “increased error rates” for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.

“We are working to fully restore service as quickly as possible,” the company wrote at the time.

Around 1:30 p.m. ET, AWS said it was starting to see “early signs” of EC2 recovery in some regions and that it was applying fixes to remaining areas “at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside.”

Amazon also confirmed that the outage impacted Amazon.com, some of its subsidiaries and AWS customer support operations.

The outage was first reported at 3:11 a.m. ET in AWS’ main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. A notice on AWS’ status page said it was experiencing DNS problems with DynamoDB, its database service that underpins many other AWS applications.

DNS, or Domain Name System, translates website names to IP addresses so browsers and other applications can load.

AWS cited an “operational issue” affecting multiple services and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” in an update at 5:01 a.m. ET. More than 70 of its own services were affected.

AWS said in an update at 6:35 a.m. ET that the DNS issue had been “fully mitigated” and that AWS service operations were “succeeding normally.”

AWS is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure technology, accounting for around a third of the market, ahead of Microsoft and Google, according to Synergy Research Group. Millions of companies and organizations rely on AWS for cloud computing services, such as servers and storage.