It appears that Amazon Web Services has suffered another outage tonight. The AWS Service Health Dashboard confirms that there were Internet connectivity issues at the EC2 location in the US-EAST-1, as well as issues with the Amazon Relational Database Service in Virginia. Amazon lists both issues as resolved but some sites, with the total downtime amounting to less than half an hour. It’s not clear how many Availability Zones were affected, or if this affected the entire US-EAST-1 region.
TechCrunch reported that several sites, including Foursquare, Instagram, Quora and Reddit went down. Each of these appear to be back up. However Netflix remains offline as of this writing. Update: As of 8:41 PT Netflix appears to be back up.
No word yet whether this has anything to do with the outage at AWS Dublin yesterday.
The outage in April lead to a number of post-mortems, including one by AWS itself which claimed the outage was caused by an error during a network upgrade that resulted in Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes causing major malfunctions that spilled over to the Amazon Relational Database Service.
Many companies, including Netflix, vowed to investigate multiple region and multiple Availability Zone fail-over solutions. It appears that at least in the case of Netflix these plans had yet to be implemented at the time of tonight’s outage.
