Amazon Web Services (AWS) looked set for more issues yesterday (October 29) as outage reports started to spike on the monitoring website DownDetector. This looked bad after a mass outage last week caused chaos — but this time AWS itself disputed what was being reported.
According to the AWS service status page, all services "are operating normally," and the company told Tom’s Guide: "The only resource on the internet that provides accurate data on the availability of our services is the AWS Health Dashboard."
To complicate matters, we started to receive unconfirmed reports from users emailing about their own issues with “UnfillableCapacity” errors and a loss of Fire TV, seemingly caused by problems with Amazon's service.
What actually happened?
It comes down to two things: interdependence and the widespread impact of the very real Microsoft outage that hit yesterday. In particular, the Azure Front Door (AFD). An “inadvertent configuration change” caused Microsoft’s network and routing service to go down (DNS resolution failures).
Think of it like a massive, complex telephone switchboard that instantly connects a large chunk of apps and websites on the planet. AFD is the lead operator and accidentally flipped the wrong central switch.
While this was happening, user outage reports for AWS spiked too. My email inbox exploded with readers writing in, and X/Twitter jumped on the bandwagon. But many large companies and apps use a multi-cloud strategy — relying on both AWS and Azure for different services.
Once Azure flipped the wrong central switch, it disrupted services that also use AWS in its components, but the problem wasn’t AWS itself. “We are aware that an operational issue at another infrastructure provider may have impacted some customers' applications and networks,” AWS clarifies on its service health page.
Then came the domino effect of the widespread impact. Because a huge portion of the internet relies on a few major cloud providers like Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, a big failure on one can impact others, which in turn leads to outage reports for respective services that aren’t actually affected.
How we report on outages
It’s important that we make this clear. We serve you. Our readers, and nobody else. That is why we are led by a combination of three things: user outage reports on platforms like Down Detector, user-submitted emails documenting their own experiences, and company service status pages.
That being said, there’s an alteration we can make to our process of live reporting on possible cloud service outages. We must question first before declaring an answer in our headlines and coverage, because as you saw yesterday, interdependencies can cause confusion about what is down and what isn’t.
Only when we see something concrete on a cloud service status page, a company comment or verified evidence from our readers will we change our stance from saying “is something down?” to “something is down.”
We believe this is the fairest way to approach outages going forward. That being said, if you have any suggestions, questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to me in the comments section.
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