Here's what happened

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On June 13 2023 at 18:49 UTC, 13:49 EST, the leading cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant downtime incident in the US-EAST-1 region.

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According to the Parametrix Cloud Monitoring System (PCMS) the main impacted service was Lambda which caused direct errors for customers using Lambda and for additional services such as API Gateway.

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AWS have since traced the root cause of the outage to a subsystem responsible for capacity management in AWS Lambda. The figure below shows us that from 18:49 UTC to 21:37 UTC, 13:49 - 16:37 EST, Lambda experienced a sudden drop in success rate and became unavailable for a duration of 2 hours and 48 minutes.

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It wasn't until 20:48 UTC, 15:48 EST, that AWS officially acknowledged the incident, confirming that the event had indeed begun at 18:49 UTC, 13:49 EST. Here are some notable highlights:

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AWS Lambda

As the primary service affected by the issue, AWS Lambda experienced an extended outage. Despite slight improvements detected by the monitoring system at 20:42 UTC, 15:42 EST, full recovery was not achieved until 21:37 UTC, 16:37 EST, indicating the complexity of the underlying issue.

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AWS API Gateway

Starting from 18:49 UTC until 20:42 UTC, 13:49 - 15:42 EST, the monitoring system observed a sharp increase in errors on the client side, indicating that API Gateway in the US-EAST-1 region became unresponsive. This disruption caused significant inconvenience for users relying on this critical service.

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AWS Other Services

While AWS Lambda faced the brunt of the outage, the monitoring system also detected interruptions in multiple other AWS services.Customers have experienced authentication or sign-in errors when using the AWS Management Console, or authenticating through Cognito or IAM STS, as well as issues when attempting to initiate a Call or Chat to AWS Support.

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Conclusion

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Thousands of end-users in the US were flooding the web with reports and complaints of interrupted service.

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As dependency on the cloud, and on this particular region in general, continues to rise, businesses must address the risk of  cloud outages- by looking into redundancy measures, and disaster recovery strategies to minimize downtime and ensure reliable service delivery.

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For more information on the persistence and impact of cloud outages on businesses today, view Parametrix latest report on cloud downtime: Managing Cloud Outage Risk.