AWS blames human error, typo, for Wednesday's massive internet outage

UPDATE March 3: Amazon has blamed human error and a typo for a glitch with its giant Amazon Web Services cloud-hosting platform, which caused problems for many websites and apps over 11 hours on Wednesday.

In a post post-mortem, the company says a staffer was investigating an issue with a billing system when they entered a command to take a limited number of AWS servers offline. The person incorrectly typed the command, leading to many servers going offline.

EARLIER: Xero, Instagram, other services hit by widespread AWS outage

March 1: The giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is reporting high error rates with its S3 hosting service — meaning interrupted service for AWS clients from Xero to Instagram.

The problems first occurred around 8.30am NZT and have so far lasted around an hour.

NBR would poke fun at Xero boss Rod Drury but the free version of NBR Radio is on AWS client SoundCloud and misbehaving.

AWS, owned by Amazon (the e-tailer) has emerged as the world's largest cloud hosting platform.

A technical glitch in June last year affected a wide range of AWS-hosted services in New Zealand, from Westpac online banking to Domino's online pizza ordering to Spark's Lightbox streaming video on-demand service.

Despite the odd spill, AWS' client list keeps growing. Last week, NZX-listed Orion Health said it was migrating 110 million patient records to Amazon's cloud.

Mighty River Power and Spark Ventures are among AWS's other hero customers.

Amazon has yet to give an indicative time for resolving its technical problems, which are hitting sites and services intermittently rather than taking them offline altogether.

The June 2016 outage, which lasted for around half a day for some AWS-hosted services, was blamed on a backup and redundancy systems failing to kick-in after an Amazon data centre in Sydney was hit by power failure during a major storm.

Amazon S3 down. All the pagers have gone off. Grab a coffee and the Internet will be back soon https://t.co/jJd9AJTld3

— Rod Drury (@roddrury) February 28, 2017

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

Xero is currently impacted by this & we're working with AWS to get back online as asap: https://t.co/b18p7E49vqhttps://t.co/agOoMzVBhC

— Xero accounting app (@Xero) February 28, 2017