Amazon Web Services outage was caused by a typo

The Amazon Web Services went down a few days back causing a number of websites such as Netflix, Quora, Spotify, Pinterest, Trello, Slack, Buzzfeed, etc go down. Even the website that is meant to check if the other sites are working fine was down due to the disruption in the service.

Following the outage, Amazon investigated the matter to find the root cause. Amazon didn't stop there but revealed the reason officially bringing clarity in the matter. As per Amazon, a single typo (a wrong command) executed by an employee is the prime cause of the cascading effect that took a number of websites down.

It was an employee of the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) team, who caused the outage. While conducting a routine debugging operation, the employee meant to take down a few servers those handled the S3 billion process but a large number of servers were removed due to a typo one of the inputs in the given command.

Amazon Web Services outage creates chaos among internet users

While the four hours of disruption is said to have caused an estimated loss of $160 million, Amazon has announced that it is working on steps that will make sure a similar disruption does not happen again in future. The company has implemented automatic checks, where the capacity will be removed slowly. This way, any incorrect command will not disrupt the services in the future.