Amazon Data Center Outage Affects Netflix, Heroku, Others

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

From around 2 am to 8 am PDT Sunday morning, Amazon Web Services reported increased errors for the various services running out of its North Virginia data center, impacting some of the internet’s most popular sites and cloud services.

Amazon’s NoSQL database service, DynamoDB, went down early Sunday at the company’s North Virginia data center which hosts the US-East-1 availability zone, causing other services that rely on DynamoDB to have increased error rates.

Several organizations that depend on that region saw their services go down for several hours Sunday morning. Some of the services reportedly impacted include Netflix, Reddit, Product Hunt, Medium, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe, Pocket, Viber, Amazon Echo, NEST, and IMDB. Some services that use AWS such as Twitter and Slack did not experience downtime. Platform-as-a-Service Heroku can’t boot new Linux containers known as “dynos.”

Among the services impacted include Amazon CloudWatch, AppStream, CloudSearch, Cognito, EC2 Cloud, EC2 Containers, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Transcoder, ElastiCache, Glacier, Kinesis, Machine Learning, Mobile Analytics, Redshift,Amazon Relational Database Service, Simple Email Service, WorkSpaces, Auto Scaling, AWS CloudFormation, CloudHSM, CloudTrail, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda , and Storage Gateway.

Amazon’s US-East-1 outage has illustrated the importance of cloud redundancy, which many web professionals quickly pointed out on Twitter. For instance, Laurie Voss, co-founder and CTO of javascript package manager npmjs, noted that it pays to use multiple colocation providers to have true redundancy.

Others mentioned that there could be too much reliance on single cloud services, whether it’s Amazon, Microsoft or IBM. Adam Thody, Technology VP of Toronto development shop Normative, said this is the disadvantage to treating US-East-1 like a “personal server closet”. React.js Training co-founder Michael Jackson noted on Twitter, the AWS outage “reminds us that we all have a single point of failure now. In some ways, we used to be more resilient than that.”

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/aws-north-virginia-data-center-outage-affects-netflix-heroku-others