Amazon Says Employee Error Caused Tuesday's Cloud Outage
- Worker took down too many servers while fixing billing system
- Company pledges to make several changes to avoid recurrence
Amazon Outage Disrupts ‘Big Part of the Internet’
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Amazon.com Inc. said a human error at its cloud business caused sweeping outages across the internet for several hours earlier this week.
Amazon said efforts to fix a billing system bug caused prolonged disruptions Tuesday. An Amazon Web Services employee working on the issue accidentally switched off more computer servers than intended at 9:37 a.m. Seattle time, resulting in errors that cascaded through the company’s S3 service, Amazon said in a statement Thursday. S3 is used to house data, manage apps and software downloads by nearly 150,000 sites, including ESPN.com and aol.com, according to SimilarTech.com.