What caused Amazon’s outage?

Robotic vacuum cleaners wouldn’t start. Doorbell cameras stopped watching for package thieves, though some of those deliveries were canceled anyway. Netflix and Disney movies got interrupted and The Associated Press had trouble publishing the news.

A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network on Dec 7 severely disrupted services at a wide range of US companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet and its concentration in the hands of a few firms.

That uncertainty was underscored when Amazon reported another outage last week that, while much shorter and less disruptive than the Dec. 7 problem, still created problems for many of its cloud customers. On a status dashboard for the service, Amazon reported that a power failure in one of its data centres had disrupted customers whose tasks ran on its servers.

Power was restored after about 45 minutes, although the company said some customers continued to experience problems almost 12 hours following the outage. Hardware failures in the affected data centre forced some Amazon customers to restart their cloud-based systems entirely.

How did it happen?

Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong in the early December outage. The company limited its communications at the time to terse technical explanations on an Amazon Web Services dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon’s own warehouse and delivery operations but said the company was working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Among the most influential organisations to rethink its approach of depending on a single cloud provider was the Pentagon, which canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10bn

The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected eastern US, but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazons own massive e-commerce operation.