Amazon Web Services outage caused by a single wrong command
by from Techreport on (#2EHW8)
Over the last couple of days you may have noticed some of your favorite websites having problems, or even simply being down altogether. The source of the issue was a failure of two key subsystems in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as S3. A message straight from AWS says the issue was caused when an "authorized employee working from an established playbook" entered an improper command and removed a much larger set of servers than intended from a pool supporting the S3 index and placement subsystems.
Affected sites included huge swathes of the web. We at TR were mostly unaffected, but BusinessInsider, Quora, Imgur, Giphy, and the file upload features of many services (including Slack and Discord) were disrupted. Folks with ...