Outages seem to have become a common occurrence this year, and more so with AWS. Large portions of the internet have been affected time and again by several issues. One of the earliest cases was the outage suffered by WhatsApp and Facebook, followed by a Fastly glitch which resulted in an outage for news sites such as BBC and CNN and a bug in Akamai’s DNS system which resulted in yet another outage.
For AWS though, it is rather glum record it just set. Amazon Web Services (AWS) today completed its hattrick in suffering outages in a calendar month as a power outage in its US-EAST-1 region affected services like Slack, Asana, Hulu, Epic Games, and others. While Slack said that its services were experiencing issues with file uploads, message editing, and other services,” many of Asana’s users were unable to access Asana. As for Epic Games, it saw that logins, library, purchases, and others were being affected.
Amazon’s EAST-1 region is hosted in Northern Virginia and covers cities including Boston, Houston, and Chicago.
However, the issue has been resolved, and the aforementioned apps are now working properly. The outage may have been resolved soon, but it is still a matter of concern given that it is not the first outage suffered by Amazon and AWS this month, and it is highly unlikely that it will be the last.
Around 7:30 AM EST, the power outage in the data center started, affecting one Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) within the US-EAST-1 Region. “We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center,” Amazon said as it confirmed the power outage on its Service Health Dashboard.
The issue was resolved soon as Amazon said it had restored power to the affected servers by 9:51 AM EST. By 12:28 PM EST, the company restored the underlying connectivity to the majority of the remaining systems. However, users might continue to experience network connectivity issues for a portion of the impacted EC2 (Elastic Computing) computing service.
Amazon recommended that customers who were waiting for a specific EC2 instance or EBS volume to relaunch the instance or recreate the volume from a snapshot for full recovery, and contact AWS support in case of further assistance.
