Network connectivity causes problems in EC2
This is an update to an original blog post.
“Network connectivity issues” that sprouted up this morning in Amazon Web Service’s cloud impacted a variety of services in the popular IaaS platform, but the issue has been resolved now.
AWS first reported on its status dashboard that it was investigating the network issues at around 10:30 AM ET this morning. A variety of services were impacted including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Amazon RedShift (the data warehousing service), AWS Relational Database (RDS), Simple E-mail Service and CloudHSM, which is a security service. The issue was isolated to a single Availability Zone within the US-East 1 region in Northern Virginia. AWS reported that impacted instances were unreachable via public IP addresses, but still may have been able to communicate with other instances within the Availability Zone.
Shortly after 1 PM ET, AWS said the issue has been resolved and the system is operating normally now.
[WE’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE: Amazon EBS failure brings down Reddit, Imgur, others ]
It’s unclear how widespread the fallout was from the incident, but some sites showed signs of disruption. Flickr, the online photo sharing site, was down and some media reported it could have been because of the AWS issues, but an Amazon spokesperson said that Flickr does not run on AWS, so it appears that was unrelated.
TalkingPointsMemo, the online blog, acknowledged on its homepage that it is experiencing “episodic site slowness and downtime tied to problems at AWS.”
Amazon has had issues in its US-East region before, which some believe is Amazon’s oldest and largest service region. The outage in late 2012 in that region caused AWS to issue refunds to customers because of an outage in that region.
Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
