Amazon CloudFront DNS Service Suffers Pre-Thanksgiving Outage

A cloud service outage is problematic for customers and partners at any time, but leading into Thanksgiving and Black Friday is perhaps the worst time for issues.

That’s exactly what happened the afternoon before Thanksgiving, though, as Amazon Web Services’ CloudFront DNS server went down for two hours. The outage started at 4:15 p.m. PST but was up and running again as of 6:02 p.m., according to the Amazon Web Services status page. Reports indicate the DNS server issues knocked a handful of websites and cloud services offline for periods of time, as the content delivery network was unable to fulfill DNS requests during the time period.

Amazon has not yet commented on the causes of the outage, but it’s likely the public cloud giant will provide some additional details about the outage this week.

The outage was poorly timed, but it could have much worse. With Black Friday sales already on and the biggest shopping day in the U.S. right around the corner, the outage could have had a much greater impact on Amazon’s customer base.

Click here for Talkin’ Cloud’s Top 100 CSP list

It’s also not the first time Amazon Web Services has experienced outages right around major holidays. Two years ago on Christmas Eve, right about the time many of would be firing up A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Amazon’s US East (North Virginia) data center went down, taking with its Netflix. The data center wasn’t fully operational again until sometime on Christmas Day.

For most of 2014, Amazon Web Services has been fairly fortunate, with only mostly only minor disruptions. Even Thanksgiving Eve’s outage was relatively uneventful and minor. It was just the timing that was worrisome.