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AWS is Down

posted by takyon on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the mission-critical-infrastructure dept.

hellcat writes:

From The Verge:

Amazon's web hosting services are among the most widely used out there, which means that when Amazon's servers goes down, a lot of things go down with them. That appears to be happening today, with Amazon reporting "high error rates" in one region of its S3 web services, and a number of services going offline because of it.

Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and Splitwise all appear to be offline, as are websites built with the site-creation service Wix; GroupMe seems to be unable to load assets (The Verge's own image system, which relies on Amazon, is also down); and Alexa is struggling to stay online, too. Nest's app was unable to connect to thermostats and other devices for a period of time as well.

Isitdownrightnow.com also appears to be down as a result of the outage.

Amazon has suffered brief outages before that have knocked offline services including Instagram, Vine, and IMDb. There don't appear to be any truly huge names impacted by this outage so far, but as always, its effects are widespread due to just how many services — especially smaller ones — rely on Amazon.

There's no estimate on when service will be restored, but Amazon says it is "actively working on remediating the issue."

PS - BTW - thumbs up to our great behind the scenes guys! Good luck N.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:23PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:23PM (#473276) Journal
    The problem is correlated failure. This was why Katrina caused a load of insurance companies to go out of business (and not pay out as a result), whereas the hurricane the next year did more damage but didn't kill any insurance companies. It's easy to understand the risk of service X going down and if services X, Y, and Z are independent then you can handle them as independent risks. If they all depend on (or, worse, provide some portion of) some common infrastructure then the probability of failure might be lower, but the probability of independent failure is zero: if one goes down then they all will. You see the same thing on a smaller scale when a small company gets two ISPs to provide connections so that they have high reliability Internet access, only to discover that they use the same back-haul provider and all of the downtime comes from there, so if one goes down the other one will as well.
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