Amazon investigating major cloud outage, GitHub and Heroku report issues

Update 10-08-2015 10.48: At 2.38am PDT, Amazon said it has taken multiple steps to reduce latencies and error rates for S3, but customers may continue to experience issues.

Update 10-08-2015 10.53: Amazon has reported further issues with CloudSearch, Elastic MapReduce clusters, CloudTrail events, Lambda APIs, and provisioning and scaling times for load balancers.

Update 10-08-2015 12.30: At 3.46am PDT, Amazon said the errors have been corrected and all services are operating normally. 'We identified the root cause and pursued multiple paths to recovery,' it said.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is facing a major cloud outage this morning with both its Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC) and Simple Storage Service (S3) solutions experiencing a huge number of request errors in the U.S.

At 12.36am PDT, the company said it is investigating elevated errors for requests made to Amazon S2 in the US-STANDARD region.

Fifteen minutes later, it reported further request errors for the EC2 APIs and launch failures for new EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

It has since also reported elevated latencies affecting its SendEmail, SendRawEmail and SendSMTPEmail APIs in the US-EAST-1 region.

Just under 30 minutes after the problems started, Amazon said it was investigating the issues.

Then at 1.08am PDT, the company said: ‘We believe we have identified the root cause of the elevated error rates and latencies for requests to the US-STANDARD Region and are working to resolve the issue.’

At 1:52 AM PDT, it added: 'We are actively working on the recovery process, focusing on multiple steps in parallel. While we are in recovery, customers will continue to see elevated error rate and latencies.'

Cloud platform-as-a-service firm Heroku, which runs on AWS, has confirmed in the last hour that it is having issues with an upstream provider, resulting in build errors and customers not being able to push changes to apps.

Another AWS customer, hosting service GitHub, has also said it is investigating increased error rates on repository release downloads and issue image uploads, while numerous other customers have taken to Twitter to report outages.

Previous outages have affected websites like Vine and Airbnb, and highlight how many of the world's most popular web services rely on the health of AWS's data centres.

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Ben Rossi

Ben was Vitesse Media's editorial director, leading content creation and editorial strategy across all Vitesse products, including its market-leading B2B and consumer magazines, websites, research and...

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