Amazon Web Services became unreachable again; blocking many services. The company has shared the details about the incident in the US-EAST-1 region. Among this region, the USE1-AZ4 codenamed Availability Zone has been stopped working. This also affected the connectivity and availability of EC2 compute instances.
Several online services were affected
The reason behind this outage is the loss of power. Online services like Slack, Epic Games, Asana, and Hulu have all been affected by the incident. Amazon quickly fixed the data center’s power issue, but total recovery was delayed due to connectivity issues right after the power-on.
The company has shared the details on their Service Health Dashboard:
« We can confirm a loss of power within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. This is affecting availability and connectivity to EC2 instances that are part of the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone. We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. »
Since availability is one of the most important aspects of online services, it is quite surprising that a giant like AWS has so frequent shortages. On December 7, the same US-EAST-1 region went down for hours due to some networking problems. On December 17, the connectivity between two of AWS West Coast servers has been lost, affecting several online services like Slack and Netflix.