Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) dealt with a major outage yesterday.
The company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure was shut down on Tuesday due to nothing more than an employee typo, the e-commerce retailer announced on Thursday. Apparently, the worker was trying to fix a bug that was plaguing its servers.
The company noted that the worker was trying to debug an issue that was causing the S3 billing system to have issues as it worked more slowly than expected. The worker was supposed to knock out a small number of servers to fix the issue, but accidentally knocked out all of them.
“Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” the company wrote.” The systems had to be restarted completely, which took a while.
The process of restarting these servers and the safety checks to go along with them took much longer than expected. Other AWS services that rely on the cloud for one function or another were also hit hard by the issue.
As of 1:18 p.m. PT, the servers had recovered, while the payment servers were fully functional as of 1:54 p.m. AWS is making a number of changes to the servers in order to avoid an issue such as this one in the future.
AMZN shares grew nearly 0.1% Friday.
