Network Issues Cause Amazon Cloud Outage

On Friday 13^th  2013 Amazon Web Services cloud computing  platform was having trouble in its US-EAST-1 Region between 7:04 a.m. and 8:54 a.m. Pacific Time. There were connectivity issues affecting a portion of the instances in a single availability zone.

Affected services included the mainstay EC2 compute service, load balancers, the Redshift data warehouse, the relational database service, and the simple email service, while among affected customers were Salesforce’s platform-as-a-service cloud Heroku and Github.

Amazon posted a status at 9:46am Pacific Time on the AWS status page: “Between 7:04 AM and 8:54 AM we experienced network connectivity issues affecting a portion of the instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Impacted instances were unreachable via public IP addresses, but were able to communicate to other instances in the same Availability Zone using private IP addresses. Impacted instances may have also had difficulty reaching other AWS services. We identified the root cause of the issue and full network connectivity had been restored.”

The Northern Virginia data center is Amazon’s oldest public-cloud facility, and has had numerous problems ranging from Elastic Block Store cockups, a huge generator failure, and even a massive general outage in summer 2012.

References:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/09/13/network-issues-cause-amazon-cloud-outage/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/13/amazon_cloud_problem_north_virginia/

http://status.aws.amazon.com/