Amazon hits Outage, Data Centers affected

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Recently the top web company Amazon suffered an Outage thereby slowing down other major websites along too. Amazon Web Services which is a collection of remote computing and together make a cloud based platform primarily offered by Amazon.com (the largest online commerce company and also the largest retailer) hit a snag and its feeds were continuously updated on their status website.

Outage: Reason

Amazon offers online services for other web sites and client end applications, and notably known for providing key infrastructure for Dropbox. The primary reason was known to be power failure. The problem located in Virginia Datacenter was related to EC2 and RD Services, though ElastiCache and Elastic Beanstalk also suffered.

No doubt much of this was directed by a power outage, it is important to note that smart distribution of data should be done across global data centers. After all the functioning is all a hybrid network, if one domino goes the others go too.

Below is the log from the Dashboard of AWS:

9:33 PM PDT, Some RDS DB Instances in a single AZ are currently unavailable. We are also experiencing increased error rates and latencies on the RDS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are investigating the issue.

9:54PM PDT, New environment creations and updates are being delayed. Environments that transitioned to red are being delayed returning to green.

10:05 PM PDT, We have identified the issue and are currently working to bring the Availability Zone back online. At this time no Multi-AZ instances are unavailable.

00:11 AM PDT, As a result of the power outage tonight in the US-EAST-1 region, some EBS volumes may have inconsistent data.

01:38 AM PDT, Almost all affected EBS volumes have been brought back online. Customers should check the status of their volumes in the console. We are still seeing increased latencies and errors in registering instances with ELBs.

Final Log Entry:

3:19 AM PDT, From 8.40 PM to 2:00 AM PDT we experienced elevated environment launch and update times. We have recovered the single A-Z environments affected by power loss. There was no impact to multi A-Z environments. The issue is resolved and the service is operating normally.

Lessons Learnt:

Now this is not the first time AWS has been hit by an Outage. The site suffered a hit in 2008 too, and caused problems to users. But then the technology is not limited and should not entirely be blamed on the cloud technology, there could have been multiple data centers keeping the dataloads at different places, after all outages can be of any type and can occur anytime. Amazon might be thinking the same or in fact improvising on even better. But Amazon surely needs to do it soon enough, since a lot of sites are expected to go down otherwise.

Technosomes would also like to know what exact method or strategy AWS is going to implement. Till then we just hope everything runs fine.