Ep. 30: Major AWS Outage Highlights Dependencies Within Cloud Providers

Summary

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. If you’re an AWS customer or rely on services that use AWS, you might have noticed the major, hours-long outage last week. On November 25th, at approximately 5:15 am PST, users of Kinesis, a real-time processor of streaming data, began to experience service interruptions. The issue was not network-related, and AWS later issued a detailed incident post-mortem analysis identifying an existing operating system configuration issue that was triggered by a maintenance event involving added server capacity. Over the course of the day, Amazon attempted several mitigation measures, but the outage was not completely resolved until approximately 10:23 pm PST.