Overwhelmed network devices triggered outage, says AWS

In a post on the AWS website, the company explained that an automated process caused the outage, which began around 10.30 a.m. ET (Eastern Time Zone) in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region, reports The Verge.

San Francisco: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of the tech giant Amazon, has come up with an explanation on the root cause of the outage that downed parts of its own services, as well as the third-party websites and online platforms that utilise AWS.

In a post on the AWS website, the company explained that an automated process caused the outage, which began around 10.30 a.m. ET (Eastern Time Zone) in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region, reports The Verge.

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“An automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network,” the company was quoted as saying.

“This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the main AWS network, resulting in delays for communication between these networks,” the company added.

According to the report, this issue even impacted Amazon’s ability to see what exactly was going wrong with the system.

It prevented the company’s operations team from using its real-time monitoring system and internal controls that they typically rely on, explaining why the outage took so long to fix.