The Amazon Web Services outage: business continuity implications and actions | Continuity Central

On Feb 28th 2017 a four-hour outage impacted one of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) largest cloud regions, US-EAST-1 in North America. Since many enterprises rely on AWS this outage, many times longer than the expected annual downtime for the S3 cloud storage system where the issue occurred, is highly concerning and requires a rapid review by business continuity managers.

The outage, caused by high error rates affecting the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), commenced at 12:35 pm ET and was fully restored by 4:49 pm ET, according to AWS. Amazon S3 is ‘object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web’ says AWS. It is marketed as being ‘designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability’; a claim which is now clearly questionable!

The lessons from this incident need to be learned; and Continuity Central would like to invite the views of business continuity professionals. To do this they have set up a quick Survey Monkey survey: please take part here, it will only take a few minutes.