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Amazon Resolves Majority of Cloud Service Issues, Questions Remain
Amazon Web Services attributed the outages to latency and connectivity issues affecting its Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service, but questions remain about what caused the failure.
Amazon has restored cloud computing services for a majority of its customers after technical problems at a data center on Thursday left numerous organizations with slow or disrupted services throughout the weekend.
Amazon Web Services attributed the outages to latency and connectivity issues affecting its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS). Some customers have pointed to service issues related to their Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volumes running on EC2.
The service disruption occurred after a failure at Amazon's regional datacenter in Northern Virginia occurred Thursday morning, as reported.
Amazon said it will get the bottom of what caused the failure.
"We are digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed postmortem," the company said in a status update on its Service Health Dashboard Sunday night. Amazon indicated it has contacted the customers it knows were affected by the outage but urged those that were still having issues to contact the company.
"The vast majority of affected EBS volumes have been restored by this point, and we are working through a more time-consuming recovery process for remaining volumes," the company said Sunday afternoon.
A number of customers were affected, including Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and HootSuite, though they are all back online.
Nonetheless, Amazon's outage was significant enough that it will likely cause those who have reserved judgment over the use of cloud computing services to sustain those reservations. For others, it will place greater emphasis on service-level agreements and redundancy.