Amazon Web Services have explained what caused an outage that downed parts of the platform.
Amazon
The problem occurred last Tuesday (07.12.21) and caused problems for Alexa, Ring and Disney+ while even putting some Amazon deliveries on hold and the web giant has now revealed that overwhelmed network devices triggered the outage.
The report from Amazon says: "An automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behaviour from a large number of clients inside the internal network.
"This resulted in a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the main AWS network, resulting in delays for communication between these networks."
The report claims that it impacted Amazon's ability to see what was wrong with the system and explains why it took so long to fix the outage.
As Amazon's Support Contact Centre also runs on the AWS network, customers were not able to create support cases for seven hours during the outage.
Amazon's Service Health Dashboard, which the platform uses to provide status updates, was also affected, resulting in the company's delayed response to the issue.
The web firm has now said that they are working on a way to improve its response to outages and are planning to release a revamped version of the Service Health Dashboard that should enable customers to receive a timely update when an outage happens.