The Complete History of AWS Outages
1 min read, last updated on 2021-12-20
Introduction
How many major outages AWS had in the past? 🤔
Such a question hit me in 2017 when Amazon S3 had one of the worst outages in cloud history.
So I decided to prepare content about that. The idea appeared in 2017, and yet, we need to have another big one in us-east-1 again, more than 3 years later, to force me to dust off the topic. So I have refurbished the notes I have prepared back then and prepared a timeline.
It turned out it was an exciting journey, and I am sharing those results with you down below. I am doing that hoping that it won’t jinx anything. 🙈 Let’s go then!
Resources
- danluu/post-mortems: this is a great source, I strongly recommend it!
- It’s so great because it’s not only about AWS.
- AWS Post-Event Summaries
- My spreadsheet, that I have used below.
Timeline
Summary
My goal was to collect all the most critical outages of AWS cloud that happened over the years. However, did I collect every single one? I doubt it, so I encourage you in the comments to remind me which one I have missed! 🎯
Also, I would love to hear horror stories that were the most painful for you personally - I intuitively feel that those most recent, related to Amazon S3 and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams will be at the top. But who knows? Maybe I am wrong? Share yours in the comments below.
UPDATE (20.12.2021): I have added the most recent outage that happened in us-west-1 and us-west-2 on 15th of December, and I hope it concludes all outages that we had this year. 😅 I am looking forward to outage-free 2022!
