The Amazon Web Services, specifically the Hardware Security module appliance, were impacted by problems in connectivity resulting to a downtime which lasted for more than an hour and 18 minutes on Friday.
Although this lag in service only affected one of its availability zones, it collapsed other backup systems for subscribers who require high speeds. A specific customer, API Management Spanish firm Wuaki.tv found that their production systems in the U.S East and U.S West availability zones, which is part of its emergency plans in business risk cases of this scale, also went dark.
This Hardware Secure Module or HSMCloud is a service set to provide customers the encryption keys protected within the AWS, while having them accessible through their virtual devices or equipment being run in Amazon's Virtual-Private-Cloud. This is a very efficient way since traditionally if would be slow to access the keys when kept on-premise and retrieved every time they need to perform an encryption.
Amazon reported that the said service soon stabilized at 9:22 a.m PST. However, the company did not provide any reasons for the outage except for the obscure postings on their dashboard.
Aside from the HSM Cloud, there were also other services affected within the North Virginia establishment. During the same time, the Simple Email Services, Relational Database Services, EC2Compute, Red Shift Data Warehouse Services, and ElasticLoad Balancing also had service issues in one availability zone.
Systems Operations engineer Rhommel Lamas from Wuaki.tv also shared that he started to notice the buildup of delays in his monitoring tool a few good minutes before Amazon reported the issue in its dashboard system. Their U.S East region B systems began to fail with severe lag and system errors. He also said that their company also suffered lost packets of messages and also communication failure between different zones.
The good news was that the downtime did not cause serious problems in the business because the emergency risk plans worked as intended.
Whether or not businesses were heavily impacted by the downtime, Amazon has not released any announcement yet if it will offer credit or service guarantees to its clients.
