Typo blamed for Amazon's internet-crippling outage

Human error downed sites and services reliant on AWS, as engineer trying to fix billing issues took out far more than they intended to with errant command

Amazon has blamed the outage of its S3 web service, which took down many different sites, services and devices across the internet, on a typo.

The failure of a critical section of Amazon Web Services (AWS) called S3 (Simple Storage Solution) on Tuesday, led to sites such as Business Insider and Medium failing, while some people found they could not turn on their internet-connected lightbulbs because automation service Ifttt was knocked offline.