Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is coming clean on what caused their cloud services to go down in late April.
Amazon’s problem started while it was trying to upgrade network capacity at its AWS datacenter for the eastern region located in northern Virginia.
“During the change, one of the standard steps is to shift traffic off of one of the redundant routers in the primary EBS [Elastic Block Store] network to allow the upgrade to happen,” Amazon stated.
Instead of doing the cloud equivalent of blocking off one direction of a superhighway and rerouting the traffic through the other lanes, however, AWS staff accidentally routed that traffic off the freeway and onto a secondary road not built for the volume.