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Incident ID: 19
Incident Type:
Outage
Summary: Amazon EC2 experienced a power outage caused by an electrical ground fault and short circuit in a major power distribution panel
Amazon EC2 experienced two power outages on May 4 and an extended power loss early on Saturday, May 8. In each case, a group of users in a single availability zone lost service, while the majority of EC2 users remained unaffected. Saturday’s outage began at about 12:20 a.m. and lasted until 7:20 a.m., and affected a “set of racks,†according to Amazon, which said the bulk of customers in its U.S. East availability zone remained unaffected. “The loss of power was caused by an electrical ground fault and short circuit in a major power distribution panel that interrupted power to some instances in this particular Availability Zone,†Amazon reported. “Before restoring power to the impacted instances, facility engineering had to find and correct the ground fault and test all switch gear and related power distribution equipment.†Amazon said the power outages caused some data loss for a “very small number†of users of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service, which has prompted a discussion of reliability issues among EBS users. One user posted an email notifying him that “multiple failures of the underlying hardware components†had caused the data loss. “Though yesterday’s issues caused impact to a very small number of volumes, even those customers were able to recover quickly if they were using the Amazon EBS feature that creates point-in-time snapshots that are persisted to Amazon S3,†Amazon said.
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Number Affected: Unknown
Organization: Amazon Web Services
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