Amazon 'Outage' Actually ISP Fiber Line Cut

The heavy snowfall and blizzard conditions that rocked the eastern region of the country this weekend seemed to have had a significant impact on Amazon Web Services and its customers. For awhile, it looked as though Amazon (AMZN) had become the first major public cloud provider to experience an outage in 2014. But the outage wasn’t Amazon’s, according to the provider.

Starting around 12:30 a.m. Jan. 6, several AWS customers found their services disrupted, starting at first with laggy performance and glitches before the services went offline.

By 2:45 a.m., more than two hours later, the services started coming back online, although it still took some time for Amazon to get all of the cloud services and applications back online.

But according to Amazon — and confirmed by its Service Health Dashboard — the public cloud leader did not suffer an outage, but instead the inability for users to connect to various AWS-hosted cloud services was due to an east coast Internet service provider experiencing a cut fiber line on January 2.

In a note to Talkin’ Cloud following the publication of this article, an Amazon representative noted that AWS did not experience an outage; nor did the extreme weather wreaking havoc on the east coast have anything to do with the issue.

Additionally, the issue only affected a small number of users, Amazon stated.

The cloud services provider has had its share of outages, particularly with its U.S.-East (Northern Virginia) data center, which houses major cloud services including Netflix. A little over a year ago, the data center went down on Christmas Eve. Other incidents have given cloud naysayers more ammo in their arsenal.