Amazon Web Services suffer major crash

Amazon Web Services, a cloud service which powers web and mobile applications, offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications. 

On September 20th, AWS servers suffered a major failure which lasted nearly five hours, the largest downtime in the history of Amazon Web Services; much larger than the 40 minute crash in 2013, reports Itproportal.

According to Zdnet, the issue started with Amazon DynamoDB service in Virginia having problems. DynamoDB, a fast, flexible NoSQL database service, is designed to support applications, which require consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at scale.

As soon as DynamoDB began having read/write issues its performance started collapsing. This affected some other AWS services in US East and soon after all the other US East AWS services application programming interfaces (API)s started timing out. And then, services built on AWS started failing.

Officially, an AWS spokesperson said, "Between 2:13 AM and 7:10 AM PDT on September 20, 2015, AWS experienced significant error rates with read and write operations for the Amazon DynamoDB service in the US-East Region, which impacted some other AWS services in that region, and caused some AWS customers to experience elevated error rates."

Such a massive failure temporarily brought down online services like Reddit, IMDb, and many others during the few hours, along with most of the websites that use Amazon Web Services for image hosting. TechRepublic reported that the online streaming giant Netflix that relies on AWS to stream movies and TV shows reported a quick recovery from Sunday's disruption - indicating the importance of its approach of building cloud-based systems to "fail".