AWS 'Can't Catch a Break': Sites and services were down due to a service outage

Being one of the top dogs in the cloud industry, we get to listen to every major and minor ongoing about AWS. Though the parent company Amazon is hugely popular for their eCommerce business, the AWS revenue skyrocketed beyond imagination. Though servers and services improved tenfold and is a continuous process, sudden bumps are noticed by clients, customers and reporters.

The connectivity issue was fixed pretty quickly, as expected from a company of such scale. It also caused losses for many dependent companies. It may not be much, but it is there still. According to the cloud provider, the connectivity outage was spectated throughout depended services such as steaming platform Twitch, Amazon.com and Ring. Doordash, Okta, Cisco's Duo Security, QuickBooks also went offline.

As reported on Wednesday, the AWS servers went offline due to a connectivity issue on the West Coast. It took down several services and websites before the team gradually patched things up.

The US-WEST 1 and US-WEST 2 regions after 11 AM eastern time suffered through the outage. It is the second one after eight days when the services were down. The consequent outage is getting fingers pointed from customers.

Thousands of reports were flagged on Downdetector, and many users said the elite cloud services are taking a hard reset before setting up for the new year. Loss of power for a trillion-dollar company is not common at all, and at the same time, frequent power outages seem to grab negative attention.

The issue was caused by loss of power in single data centres as far as the information we could gather, and it's based in the US. Slack, Asana, Epic Games Store, and Hulu are popular services that users were most irritated with.

According to Amazon status service, they are now functioning as usually indicated by 'Service is operating normally.' Reuters also reported on the brief outage of Amazon Web Services. As it affected two regions on the US West Coast to lose internet connectivity, regular users were undoubtedly disappointed.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a crucial web service business, and problems may occur at any organisation. At 4:11 AM PST, EC2 instances and EBS volumes experienced a loss of power, according to The Verge. Other close location data centres such s the US-East-1 region was not affected.

From customer support, companies still having issues with connectivity was suggested to relaunch the instances or recreate volume from snapshot library. Similar to VirtualBox disc images where we create an image of a running system to restore if problems occur, companies luckily have these facilities too. Further assistance will be provided by AWS support upon contact.

Northern California and Oregon data centres 'were not affected' and is 'operating normally' at the moment. Cisco owned business ThousandEyes, a provider of real-time visibility updates, revealed more data on the outage. Applications run by Workday, Okta, Splunk, Lattice, PagerDuty went offline.

Cloud services are interconnected like a spider net as they serve similar to backup systems, cache systems and fail-proof channels. Though tremendous losses were not an outcome, still system improvement is much needed. The company is so broad; a simple update may require updates for the whole channel. And it will not cost a simple penny.

If only AWS were facing the issue solely, it wouldn't be that big of a deal as competitor services are out there. They are still running fine, with a grain of salt. The complexity of modern hyper clouds is bound with outage issues and raising concerns. Individual customers like us question if a trillion-dollar company can't afford more backup generators. If the case were that simple, then they would've solved it the first time.

Splitting geographically by region may solve the issue for AWS, but architectural bounds remain.