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Amazon S3 Takes Down Multiple Tech Startup's Infrastructures

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Friday March 3, 2017 18:55

Amazon S3 Takes Down Multiple Tech Startup's Infrastructures

Posted by Brayden Girard

On Tuesday Feb 28 2017 after trying to access our companies tools (Trello, Slack, etc) I took a peak at Twitter to see what could be happening. Sure enough one of the worlds largest tech giants Amazon was DOWN!

On Tuesday Feb 28 2017  after trying to access our companies tools (Trello, Slack, etc) I took a peak at Twitter to see what could be happening. Sure enough one of the worlds largest tech giants Amazon was DOWN!

I am sure many of you were also affected by the outage of Amazon S3 servers in the eastern US region and the culprit to the incident may surprise you. A statement from Amazon was posted to my account today stating this:

"The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended."

It seems that even with all of the fault tolerance that should have been in place to protect the system from going down, Amazon forgot to take into account the repercussions of human error. Not only did this human error effect small ventures like my own, it also affected many larger ventures. Small bizz trends blog reports that, "everyone from Apple to Adobe, Expedia, Freshdesk, Kickstarter, Mailchimp, Slack, Twillio, and more, totaling close to 150,000 sites were affected to some degree." While I personally experienced Trello’s service being completely shut down, I am sure many others were severaly affected as well.

I wonder how much this mistake cost Amazon? Can you tell when it happened from the screenshot below!