The online retail giant, which runs a popular cloud computing platform for sites such as Airbnb, Netflix, reddit and Quora, is blaming the outage on a simple - and perhaps somewhat amusing - employee mistake. With a few mistaken keystrokes, the employee wound up knocking out systems that supported other systems that help AWS work properly. The cascading failure meant that many websites could no longer make changes to the information stored on Amazon's cloud platform. "In this instance, the tool used allowed too much capacity to be removed too quickly," Amazon said. Amazon said it was sorry for the outage's effect on its customers and vowed to learn from the incident.

Source: New Zealand Herald March 02, 2017 20:26 UTC