Amazon Web Services Experiences Outages Sunday Morning, Causing Outages On

Since Netflix, Reddit, Tinder and others are hosted on the AWS Public Cloud infrastructure, an outage impacting a core cloud service left some surfers without service.

Some of the online retail giant’s cloudy services were having a miserable Sunday. This in turn prevented services relying on AWS to forward instructions to applications.

Amazon provided limited details on the outage saying, “The metadata service is now stable and we are actively working on removing throttles”. Amazon services, including its instant video and book sites, also had problems, the Register reported. According to Fortune, on Sunday morning at around 6 a.m., Netflix and other websites that relied on Amazon went out without warning.

At time of publication, Amazon had coughed to data faults being reported on multiple services at its North Virginia US-EAST-1 site – which is the company’s oldest public-cloud facility.

Amazon’s service health dashboard exposed the problem may have been due to increased API error rates for Amazon Appstream services, although it’s unknown whether this would have impacted the services directly.

The last time AWS crashed was in 2013, when it suffered a similar outage that took services like Instagram, Airbnb and Vine offline. According to Buzzfeed, that’s a loss of about $1,100 per second for Amazon. Many companies choose to use such a service so that they do not have fund their own data centers.

CloudWatch, a monitoring system for the application that runs on the platform and Cognito, a mobile data based service also suffered outrage along with DynamoDB. As Sunday’s outages showed, the major downside for companies is that if anything goes wrong they, like their customers, have to wait.