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When youre a company thats disrupting nearly everything it touches, anything you do is reported almost instantaneously in the media. And that attention is amplified when you take down the websites of some of the worlds most known techbrands for 5 hours or so. Thats what happened to Amazon Web Services on Tuesday, February 28, 2017.

The effects of the outage have been discussed to shreds, but it now turns out that a simple mistakein a command given during a debugging run of its billing system was the root cause of the outage.

The wrong command didnt actually cause the outage, but it took down the wrong S3 servers, forcing a full restart. Considering the scale at which AWS servers operate, that took a few hours hence, the outage.

The fact that a wrong command can execute the wrong operation is understandable. After all, thats where human error plays a role. The interesting thing is that Amazon is now going to make changes to the system so incorrect commands are not able to trigger an outage like this one.

We dont know what those changes are other than the fact that capacity removal is being capped (the allowable limit was too high) and recovery times are greatly reduced, but will that prevent another outage from ever happening? Hardly. Its just one hole thats being plugged.

What we need to understand is that any technology can be broken. IBM says that cloud can be made more secure than the static security layers typically found in traditional infrastructure, but whos going to account for human error, as was clearly the case in the AWS outage?

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Source

The rest is here:
Massive AWS Cloud Server Outage Was Caused by an Incorrect Debugging Command - 1redDrop (blog)