AWS customers struggle for hours after a major outage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said its North Virginia (US-East-1) region faced disruption in services for nearly four hours, affecting thousands of customers.

“Between 11:49 AM PDT and 3:37 PM PDT, we experienced increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 region,” AWS wrote on its health status page, adding that at least 104 of its services were affected during the outage.

AWS services that were malfunctioning during these four hours included the likes of AWS Management Console, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Glue, Amazon Connect, AWS Fargate, and Amazon GuardDuty.

The root cause of the outage, according to AWS, was an “issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda.” AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service offered by the cloud provider.

“The issue with the subsystem caused errors directly for customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use of other AWS services,” the company said, adding that its customers may have failed to sign into the AWS Management Console — the interface that provides controls for managing all AWS services.

The outage also affected AWS’s website and server connections, according to Downdetector.com.

AWS customer contact handling department also experienced issues that saw enterprise customers experiencing failures when attempting to initiate a call or chat with AWS Support, the company acknowledged.

The issue related to AWS Lambda’s subsystem was resolved by 1:41 PM PDT, the company said, adding that the entire issue along with processing of backlogs was completed by 3:37 PM PDT.

The North Virginia region earlier faced an outage in December 2021 due to its network getting overwhelmed.

Last year, the AWS region in Ohio saw at least two outages.

Tuesday’s outage in the North Virginia region also affected several large AWS customers including Boston Globe, The Verge, Southwest Airlines, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the US securities regulator’s EDGAR system, according to a Reuters report.

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