Amazon Latest Hit By Series Of High-Profile Outages

Amazon’s US and Canadian shopping websites became briefly inaccessible on Monday, making it the latest high-profile victim of an outage in the past few days.

The outage began at around noon Pacific time and lasted for approximately half an hour, according to users’ posts on Twitter. Visitors to the US and Canadian websites were met with standard error messages reading, “we’re very sorry”. The UK website was unaffected.

Web services problems

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was also affected by availability issues at around the same time, with AWS users on Twitter reporting difficulties accessing the AWS control panel.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company confirmed the AWS problems on an AWS status page.

Amazon said it experienced “elevated error rates” for the AWS Management Console and “increased API error rates and latencies for tagging related API calls in the US-EAST-1 region” affecting the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Both issues are now listed as having been resolved.

Amazon currently sells $86bn (£64bn) in merchandise per year, or about $164,000 in sales per minute, according to estimates by consultants RetailNet Group, meaning any outage can cause serious loss of revenue.

Other high-profile websites seeing outages in recent days include the New York Times, Intel, Microsoft and Google – whose four-minute outage on Friday resulted in a dip in traffic across the Internet estimated at about 40 percent.

Problems affect Google, Microsoft and others

Analytics firm GoSquared said the Google outage, which affected its search engine as well as services such as Gmail, Drive and Blogger, had a “huge effect” on Internet traffic.

“Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16 August 2013,” GoSquared Engineering said in a statement. “This had a huge effect in the number of page views coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking – around a 40 percent drop.”

The last comparable Google outage occurred in 2009. The company’s Gmail service suffered an outage last year that affected around 800,000 users.

The support section of Intel’s website, as well as some pages accessible only to Intel staff, went offline for a period on Monday due to an “internal issue”, according to a statement by the chip maker, which said the issue was not related to the Amazon glitch.

The New York Times’ website outage of about two hours on Wednesday was also due to an “internal issue” according to the paper.

Microsoft said that a three-day disruption to its Outlook.com email and SkyDrive storage services last week was due to caching problems that resulted in a surge of connection attempts.

“This incident was a result of a failure in a caching service that interfaces with devices using Exchange ActiveSync, including most smartphones,” Microsoft stated. “The failure caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service. This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly, with the effect that some customers were unable to access their Outlook.com email and unable to share their SkyDrive files via email.”

The company said access has now been restored and changes have been made to make the services “more resilient”.

Last year mobile network O2 and Internet hosting giant GoDaddy experienced high-profile outages, while an AWS outage in October 2012 affected the availability of websites including Reddit, foursquare and Pinterest.

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