Widespread AWS outage traced to Virginia data center hub
The far-reaching Amazon Web Services outage that crippled some financial services, retail sales, video games, airlines and more throughout Monday is being traced to the company’s data center cluster in Northern Virginia.
Popular sites and apps were struggling to recover Monday afternoon from the stubborn outage. AWS said the issue originated at its US-EAST-1 location, the oldest and largest of the company’s web services data center hubs. The hub is often the default region for many of the company’s services and it counts more than 150 data centers in Northern Virginia.
The outage started around 3 a.m. Eastern time and was brought on by a technical update to an AWS database service called DynamoDB, according to the company. The update included incorrect domain name service for DynamoDB, which knocked the database offline at Amazon’s Northern Virginia data centers. Those facilities are utilized by large swaths of the country — primarily the East Coast.
Other AWS services began falling after that, according to the company. Amazon said an internal system that helped Amazon coordinate computing loads across its network wasn’t working, leading to the outages.
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