It was recently reported that Amazon.com went dark for nearly 30 minutes causing the company an estimated $2 million loss. Now, the world's biggest and most well-renowned cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services suffered from an almost 60-minute downtime on Sunday in its US-EAST server.
The AWS status page explained that the downtime between 12:51 p.m. Pacific Time until 1:42 p.m was caused by a network issue. At 3:23 p.m. AWS declared that most of their systems has recovered but still working on a few that needs additional maintenance before they can return to its normal performance.
The number of sites cannot be fully measured but a few had announced that they were affected by the downtime such as Instagram, Vine, Flipboard, and AirBnB. Instagram and AirBnB had acknowledged the downtime and expressed the problem through Twitter.
Airbnb tweeted:
Apologies - Airbnb is among several sites & apps that are temporarily down due issues w/ Amazon servers. Investigating now & will update.
4:32 AM - 26 Aug 2013 @Airbnb
Vine tweeted:
We're aware of some issues affecting our servers and are working to address them now. Thanks for your patience and hang tight!
5:20am - 26 Aug 13 @vineapp
The US-EAST region holds the biggest server of AWS. It is also the most active and one of the most affordable like the Oregon region. Therefore, there were more sites and services affected although they haven't reported it like what Instagram and the other services did.
Last year, AWS experienced the same problem but not as long as this recent downtime. However, it was bad timing as it happened during Christmas Eve and affected Netflix.
A quick trip on the AWS Service Health Dashboard at 2:39 A.M Pacific Time revealed that all of the services has resumed their normal operations.
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