Amazon Outage Latest Unexplained Big Name Site Failure
An Amazon outage inconvenienced back to school shoppers, but the implications of such a tech failure are worrisome.
The Amazon outage lasted for less than half an hour by most accounts Monday, beginning in the middle of the afternoon and knocking the massive online retailer off the web.
Amazon’s cloud services were unaffected, and ZDNet reports that the nature of the Amazon outage was explained, even if the reason wasn’t:
“However, after we first published this post, at 3:14 p.m. ET, the AWS Management Console was experiencing elevated error rates across all regions of the world, including North America and Europe. There was also a flagged issue with a North Virginia data center that was quickly resolved… Affected sites were restored about 25 minutes later, as was the AWS Management Console, though it was still experiencing ‘elevated error rates’ during its recovery. Amazon said it experienced ‘an increased error rate for CreateTags and DeleteTags APIs in the US-EAST-1 region.’ ”
The cause of the Amazon outage has been a topic of speculation since the normally airtight site is one we don’t often see downtime with — and Chris Green, principal technology analyst at the Davies Murphy Group consultancy, basically said what everyone else has been thinking:
“It’s very unusual to see such a number of high-profile websites all suffering peak-time outages within the course of a few days of each other… People are going to be very interested to know exactly what the reasons were for the incidents that are still unexplained because the implications are huge: we’ve seen everything from users being unable to see their email to visitors and third-party retailers who use Amazon’s marketplace being unable to buy and sell goods – all happening seemingly with no warning.”
In addition to the Amazon outage, Davies refers to similar sudden unavailability for high-profile services such as GMail, Google Drive, Outlook, and The New York Times — with the latter going offline for an unprecedented two hours last week.
