Amazon Blames Human Error for AWS Outage Bringing the shopping net to a slow crawl

Amazon Blames Human Error for AWS Outage Bringing the shopping net to a slow crawl

Amazon have been in the press a lot lately, first catching flak and dismay from millions of affiliates by reducing affiliate earnings for Amazon Associates. And again because of a "human error" that caused thousands of VPS's around the world, many that handle affiliate shopping tasks, to be taken offline, almost reducing earnings to a trickle for affiliates and for Amazon!


Image: Amazon explains big AWS outage, says employee error took servers offline, promises changes.

And if you buy and use VPS servers on any scale, you may have noticed these outages happening lately? Since most VPS's are based on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), when there is a problem with that system, the public cloud infrastructure, it has a knock on effect for millions of VPS's around the world.

And if you're wondering what's going on, this is all down to a "human mistake" a human error, on behalf of an employee working at the Amazon datacenter. Not saying who or what specifically but formally apologizing for the outage disruptions this week affecting all of its S3 storage systems in its Northern Virginia date center.

Amazon said;

"We want to apologize for the impact this event caused for our customers.

While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.

We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further,” said Amazon in a message about the outage."

There is a tweet by #AWSCloud that has thousands of replies in it, some serious, many humorous! That says they are aware and on the ball to repairing.
https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836666548311859200

So this was down to a "human mistake". It doesn't go into detail about what that mistake actually was or by who other than an employee took the servers offline. I guess that he pulled the plug! LOL!

Why was this significant?

A lot of Amazon Associates affiliates use VPS servers to handle certain tasks for them to do with shopping on Amazon, and since many of them were knocked offline, those tasks couldn't be completed which means people couldn't make their purchase in the same way or the website wouldn't earn commission etc. So it had a knock on affect by Amazon and it's affiliates.

Do you know what happened?

I haven't deeply researched this topic, but I know it would be of some importance to know about to people on here, those of us that are Amazon affiliates. But if you know what actually happened and or if it affects/affected you then let us know!