Amazon Web Services suffered a glitch on Sunday and companies that relied on their services also got affected like Netflix and Reddit among many others.
A problem affecting the DynamoDB database of Amazon Web Services bogged down not only the company's services but also other companies that rely on its public cloud infrastructure. According to Fortune, on Sunday morning at around 6 a.m., Netflix and other websites that relied on Amazon went out without warning. Accordig to reports, the U.S.-East data center complex of Amazon in Ashburn, Virginia suffered database issues which prevented sites from normally functioning.
One example problem cited was the inability of users to stream and watch Netflix videos at the time. It is a well-known fact in the tech community that Amazon maintains several data centers all over the world which many companies use to facilitate their IT functions. This practice helps many of these corporations cut costs on building their own data centers but at the price of being dependent on their provider.
Meanwhile, The Next Web reported that aside from Netflix and Reddit, companies like Product Hunt, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe, Viber, and Amazon Echo were also among the sites that got cut off. It is also not the first time that Amazon suffered such problems. In 2013, the same outage occurred that affected Instagram, Airbnb, and Vine. Buzzfeed reportedly estimated Amazon's loss at $1,100 per second which will be more than staggering the longer the issue is not resolved.
There was no immediate acknowledgement of the problem on Amazon Web Services' Twitter account. However at around 11:53 a.m. ET, services of the affected sites were reported to be coming back to normal. Amazon said while they have responded quickly to remedy the problem, the required systems restart and recovery can take longer than the actual loss of service.
