In the second week of December, 2021, Amazon Web Services experienced one of its worst outages ever. During the holiday shopping rush, the problems spread to the company’s retail operation, which uses AWS-based software and apps.
According to AWS’s explanation of what went wrong, “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, 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.”
What happened with the AWS outage?
The most recent of AWS’s major outages occurred in the second week of December and lasted five hours, affecting customers using specific application interfaces in the us-east-1 region: North Virginia. A five-hour outage is a significant incident in a public cloud the size of AWS.
Several AWS services in the region were affected like:
- Management console
- Route 53
- API Gateway
- Amazon Connect
- EC2
Basically, AWS unintentionally triggered a Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS attack) on their own internal network. The issue had a broad impact, causing varying degrees of difficulty for services like Twitch, Star Trek Timelines, the PlayStation Network, Clash Royale, Intuit Quickbooks, Slack, Netflix, USPS, Ring, Starbucks, Snapchat etc. It also affected many Amazon services, such as Prime Music, Ring doorbells, logistics apps in their fulfillment centers, and parts of the Amazon.com shopping site.
How were the customers impacted?
Firstly, the main AWS network was unaffected, which meant that AWS customer workloads were “not directly impacted”. Customers were affected by AWS services that relied on the company’s internal network.
However, the internal network glitch had a wide range of consequences for customer-facing AWS services, including computing, container, content distribution services, databases, desktop virtualization, and network optimization tools.
How can United Private Cloud help you avoid these outages?
A full report from AWS is still to come, but in the meantime, IT pros should start bolstering their cloud disaster recovery strategies now – before the next outage. United Private Cloud can help you avoid these outages by offering SLA of 99.999% service uptime.
United Private Cloud offers suites of managed services for our private cloud customers to help them meet their dynamic requirements.
We understand vulnerabilities can occur during day-to-day IT processes, which is why we offer resources to monitor your entire cloud stack, from the infrastructure to the application layer through the operating system.
The G3 Private Cloud is a software-defined private cloud architectured like a public cloud and engineered for scale and service availability of 99.999% uptime globally. It also comes with 24x7x365 fully managed enterprise support with 15 minutes response time and expert escalation every 30 minutes until resolution. With us, you get all the benefits, including high-performance, high availability, on-demand scalability, along with enhanced security of your cloud computing processes.
We also offer a variety of network security services as well as network management, cloud services and disaster recovery services to overcome any unprecedented events,
We have industry leading partnerships for providing cloud security to our customers with 10+ virtual security solutions in place.
And lastly, we enable organizations to gain performance advantages, lower costs, rapidly respond to unpredictable demand, and easily solve data sovereignty and compliance requirements across 5 continents.
About United Private Cloud
United Private Cloud comes with all the benefits of cloud computing but with the greater controls and security of an enterprise-grade software-defined private cloud.
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