AWS customers hit by Friday the thirteenth outage

It was bad luck for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its customers on Friday, as the cloud firm experienced an outage at its US East-1 Region datacentre.

The incident happened around 7.04 am Pacific Time on 13 September, with connectivity problems affecting a portion of the instances in a single availability zone. The incident lasted until 8.54am.

The firm also experienced increased error rates and latencies for the APIs for Elastic Block Storage and increased error rates for EBS-backed instance launches. Some instances were inaccessible via public IP addresses, but could be contacted using private IP addresses to other instances in the same availability zone.

The connectivity problem affected major AWS customers such as Heroku as well as parts of Github. Networking problems also impacted Amazon’s RedShift data warehousing service, Simple Messaging Services, Relational Data Service, and CloudHSM service, according to the status page.

By 9.46am, AWS had “identified the root cause of the issue and full network connectivity had been restored," according to the firm’s status page.

The US East region is one of the firm’s most popular and one of its oldest cloud facilities.

Last month an outage was suffered by AWS which led to several of the internet’s largest social media services being taken offline or experiencing intermittent service.

An outage also affected Amazon’s own retail site last month, which resulted in a disruption lasting up to an hour. No explanation for the outage, which primarily hit the AWS Management Console, was given at the time.

In 2012, EC2 on the service was repeatedly hit by outages, one of which also resulted in Twitter using its own service to apologise to users for the disruption.