Amazon Reveals What Caused the Internet Disruption

On Monday, Amazon’s hosting network mysteriously took out large portions of the internet, unsurprisingly causing first world problems for people across the country. Amazon was able to fix the issue and started searching for the cause of the problem. Evidently, that problem turned out to be a typo.

Amazon was taking a few servers offline to update their billing system when a single mistake caused parts of the internet to start crashing and knocking out the entire system.

Amazon explains that early Monday morning an authorized team member executed a command that was intended to shut down a few servers. The Amazon released a statement about what happened, “an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process.”

Amazon added, “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

An employee, who will probably always be known for making this mistake, entered the wrong command and shut down several major websites and apps. Fortunately, they were able to fix the problem, but this is a good reminder that Amazon’s hosting platform controls a significant portion of the internet.

No reports are suggesting how this has impacted Amazon sales. Good thing Amazon still has Alexa.