Amazon Web Services explains the cause of the outage and proposes countermeasures

Amazon Web Services Inc. on Friday released an explanation for an hours-long outage earlier this week that began after its network equipment became overloaded and disrupted its retail operations.   and third-party online services. The company also said it plans to revamp its status page.

The problem in the US-East-1 region , Amazon's large data center in Virginia, began at 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday , the company said .

"Automated activities to expand the capacity of an AWS service hosted on the main AWS network triggered unexpected behavior from a large number of customers within the internal network, " the company wrote in a post on its website. "As a result, the equipment connecting Amazon's internal network and the AWS network became overloaded . "

Some AWS tools were affected . AWS engineers worked to resolve the issues and restored service in the following hours. The EventBridge service, which helps software developers build applications that react to certain events, was not fully restored until 9:40 p.m. ET.

AWS apologized for the impact the outage had on its customers.

Popular websites and heavily used services were disrupted , including Disney +, Netflix and Ticketmaster. Roomba vacuum cleaners, Amazon's Ring security cameras and other internet-connected devices like smart cat litter boxes and app-connected ceiling fans were also shut down by the outage.

Amazon's own retail operations ground to a halt in some parts of the U.S. Amazon's warehouses and internal applications used by delivery personnel rely on AWS, so for much of Tuesday, employees were unable to scan packages or access delivery routes. Third-party sellers were also unable to access the website used to manage customer orders.

Additionally, customers were unable to create support cases for seven hours during the outage.

AWS said it is now taking action to address both issues.

"We expect to release a new version of our Service Health Dashboard early next year that will make it easier to understand service impacts, as well as a new support systems architecture that is actively running across multiple AWS regions to ensure we don’t experience delays in communicating with customers," AWS said.

Amazon

Network failure

System crash