Question

36. Employees can unintentionally cause havoc with apps and websites. Amazon Web Services, with more than one million users, had an hour-long cloud-computing service outage on Tuesday, February 28, 2017, which slowed apps and websites for many U.S. companies. What was the cause of the outage and approximate costs to companies in the S&P 500 index due to this series of failures? Use the Internet to find answers.

Answer 1

It is true that unintentional mistake by employees can cause havoc with apps and websites in today's world.

We can take the classic example of Amazon Web Services (AWS) . On Feb 28, 2017 , one Amazon servioce engineer was resolving one billing system issue with the cloud storage service S3. While debugging , he mistyped a command accidentally . This unintentional mistake led to a catstrophe for 4 hours. a large number of customers who used AWS cloud storage S3 faced complete blackout of their services , websites and apps for four hours and lost millions of dollard of business in the process.

In four hours the S&P 500 listed companies lost $150 Million . This excludes numerous other small or big business relying on S3 as cloud platform and other platforms of AWS that depend on S3 hosting.