Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing platform, has suffered its third outage in two weeks, this time due to a power outage that impacted Slack, the Epic Games Store, and several other services.
The AWS Service Health Dashboard blamed the data center in East Virginia that lost power in the early hours of the morning. The firm acknowledged that one of its data centers within the “single Availability Zone” lost power at 7:01 am this morning, though it claims that the issue was addressed about half an hour later.
Additionally, the firm's support page warned that some of the services continued to linger for a portion of impacted EC2 instances. It also disclosed that some users of its EBS storage service were affected by "degraded IO performance" during the outage.
Users reported problems after the outage, and the Epic Games Store noted that the AWS outage was causing problems "affecting logins, library, purchases, etc."
AWS experienced its first outage on December 7, which impacted cryptocurrency, brokerage, and entertainment services. Leading firms including Disney+, Netflix, Instacart, and McDonald’s suffered an outage on the very same U.S.-East-1 cloud region, caused by an “impairment of several network devices” which led to multiple API errors that impacted Amazon itself, as sellers were unable to access the e-commerce giant's Seller Center to manage orders.
One week later, on December 15, two AWS West Coast regions suffered an outage impacting services from the likes of Facebook, Slack, Hulu, and DoorDash.
It remains unclear why AWS has experienced multiple hiccups times this month. However, the apps, services, games, and websites that rely on AWS for their own stability are almost certainly beginning to take a long, hard look at the impact these outages are having on their own bottom lines.
“The latest AWS outage highlights why it’s so critical for businesses to design their technology infrastructure for resilience, with no single point of failure,” Gleb Budman, co-founder, and CEO of cloud storage and data backup firm Backblaze told VentureBeat. “The truth is that anything and everything can fail. Smart organizations work from that assumption, and we see a growing number taking a multi-cloud approach, with data replicated not just across regions but across providers, and portability between providers, to address this specifically,” he added.