Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again

879 points by thadjo ↗ HN
Anyone else seeing this?

496 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] thread
Yup, seeing this on us-west-1
Yes, all our stuff in west-2 went down at 7:15 PT.
Twitch video streaming is also down right now:

HTTP Error 500 internal server error

obligatory comment about status page showing seas of green: https://status.aws.amazon.com
For me, it's down as well
(comment deleted)
The status page appears to be down now as well.
yep I'm seeing that too - wow.
Maybe they got so much flak last time for it being worthless, that they just decided to pull it this time??
Love to see the manually updated status page not updating
At least Twitch.tv (Amazon subsidiary) and npmjs.com seems to be affected.
Yeah, I'm getting 2000 player errors in the Twitch video player.
Down for us (graphite.dev) as well, running on us-west-2
Seeing this on us-west-1. us-east-1 appears to be functioning for us.
I fucking swear to God.
We are seeing issues with requests to Auth0, which I believe is hosted on AWS and has historically gone down when AWS has had issues
We see issues with Auth0 too. Other AWS services we use seem to be working fine so far (us-east-1)
AWS is reporting an issue in us-west-2 on their status page.
(comment deleted)
Auth0 went down for us as well right when AWS did. At least it's not like those two systems run our entire company...
We're having issues connecting to our EC2 bastions and accessing the us-west-1 dashboard too

EDIT: Cognito auth seems down for us too

EDIT2: our ALBs are timing out as well

EDIT3: us-west-1 looks like working now!

Some npmjs.com pages are returning 503 Service Unavailable for us
Yep, we're also having issues. Hosted on us-west-2
Systems manager in eu-central-1 is giving us some issues now, but I am not sure about their internal architecture for it, so maybe needs some us resources?
Yup, trouble in us-west-2 for us.
I'm seeing outages on us-west-2 too. Customer facing traffic being served through Route53 -> ALB -> EC2 is down and CLI tools are failing to connect to AWS too.
I can't log on to the console for us-east-1. But our api gateway seems to be working, so I guess production is still up...for now...
How much do you guys think these frequent outages will effect their market share in cloud products?

Is this enough of a push for organizations to actually move over their infrastructure to other providers?

Not at all.

The other cloud providers have had their own outages.

Sadly this, people are entrenched with AWS and the... "We're not the only ones down" thing truly has some effect

Organizations can more easily swallow an AWS failure when they aren't the only ones hit. They move elsewhere, those outages look more unique

Folks may think multi cloud is a good idea... But you're just as likely to suffer from the extra points of failure as you are to benefit

Multi-cloud is such an odd idea to me. You're either building abstractions on top of things like cloud-provider specific implementations of CDNs, K8S, S3, Postgres, etc...or using the cloud just for VMs. The latter would be cheaper with just old-school hosting from Equinix, Rackspace, etc. The former feels like a losing battle.
It’s prompted discussions of building multi regional services in my org but not multi cloud. They would have to really really really screw up for that to happen… maybe be down for like a week or something.
leetcode.com is also down
(comment deleted)
I checked their health status page. All is good. /s

https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

Ok, so it can't be down then. This is proof!
They did add an update, faster than last time:

"7:42 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-2 Region."

https://status.aws.amazon.com/

Edit: They added US-WEST-1:

"7:52 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-1 Region."

Edit: Found root case, maybe?

"8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery."

"8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery."

So it is down again.
Too bad I am unable to load the status page due to connection timeouts, so I can't see the updates.
The issue is not specific to the US, same issues in Europe. Also, it seems not only AWS experiencing issues. Unless Google is hosted on AWS haha...
Yes, it could be network peering related. But there's definitely a lot of us-west-1 and us-west-2 users complaining and people saying that us-east-1 seems fine.
Seems to be resolved now. And seems they hid / took away any mentioning of possible issues. Sigh.
That is a shame. Anyone coming in after the fact to investigate an outage or glitch with their systems will need to look harder to find a known AWS outage. We can’t assume everyone looks at HN.
It's still there now, on the top of the page, just marked resolved:

us-west-1:

7:52 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-1 Region.

8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery.

8:10 AM PST We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-1 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

us-west-2:

7:43 AM PST We are investigating Internet connectivity issues to the US-WEST-2 Region.

8:01 AM PST We have identified the root cause of the Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region and have taken steps to restore connectivity. We have seen some improvement to Internet connectivity in the last few minutes but continue to work towards full recovery.

8:14 AM PST We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

someone tripped over the fiber run i bet. Or, a cleaning person unplugged a router to plugin a vacuum (that actually happened but to a minicomputer iirc)
Unfortunately the vacuum, a shiny IoT connected appliance, didn't work because AWS was down
No way a cleaning person can do that in a datacenter.
Usually the problem is "an idiot with a digger".
nah man, it's never the digger that's the idiot. it's always the project manager that told the digger where to dig. just like it's never the dev's fault as the PM made them do it. /s
I hope that their infra is not that unstable
It's interesting that west-2 was quicker to create the incident (despite the issue starting a bit later there, at least by our experience), and while they both "identified" at the same time, west-2 also waited longer to call it resolved.

I assume there are different teams responsible for each, is the west-2 team just more on top of things?

West-2 also launched many years after us-east-1, so less legacy to deal with.
1.US-East-1 wasn't involved today.

2. They don't really have much "legacy" stuff to deal with since they likely turn over racks quickly across their whole fleet and software deployments should be standardized, so any US-east-1 flakiness has to do with the fact that its where amazon houses their control planes often.

There's at least one AZ in East-1 that doesn't support nitro, and that's been around for 4ish years now...

I agree in principle, but clearly something is hobbling them because of (probably) legacy stuff

Yep, when it loads, it's all green. "nine nines!!!"
I thought that sounded ridiculous so I did the math and 99.9999999 uptime allows for 1.314 _seconds_ of downtime every 1000 years. It would take approximately 2.7 million years to acquire just an hours worth of allowable downtime, that's how long it takes light from the second nearest spiral galaxy and farthest visible object to the eye in perfect conditions [1]. Within a single quarter of a year, that's 328.5 μs (microseconds) or about 1200 blinks of an eye [2] or about 3 times faster than a typical electric capacitor camera flash [3], also approximately, and interestingly enough, less than 1% of my current ping to my ISP let alone Amazon's servers.

So yeah, having done that I now understand that it was probably a joke but it really puts into perspective just how ridiculous things can get with a few 9's.

[1] https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/triangulum-ga...

[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-we-blink-our-eyes-3879...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(photography) (wikipedia's won't let me deep link on my phone, it's in electronic flash section under types)

What does downdetector run on?
User reports — i.e. the number of people who google “is X down” and then click a Down Detector link.

It’s a clever way of getting reasonably accurate data very quickly and easily, though it does have it’s flaws — the data is pretty noisy and users often attribute outages to the wrong service (e.g. blaming their ISP or Microsoft or something when YouTube is down, or vice versa).

I would guess the user is asking what are down detector's dependencies... E.g. can their website function I'd us-east-2 goes down? Or a GCP equivalent? Or are they on a self-hosted server ? What would cause the metrics to be "off"
Down detector is just a statistical page, it does not actually detect downtime, and is in no way aws's status page.
we are having issue with us-west-1 and us-west-2
ListenNotes.com has servers running on us-west-2.

One issue is that outbound requests from our servers us-west-2 timeout. Other than that, it seems that we are running ok so far.

We lost all public IPv6 in the Linode Newark DC.

This appears to be cross-provider.

Edit: We have IPv6 back.