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Amazon reveals how a typo was to blame for taking several major websites offline

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By Cameron Clarke, Editor

March 4, 2017 | 2 min read

Amazon has said that a humble typo was to blame for several high-profile websites and services it hosts suffering downtime this week.

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Amazon says typo to blame for web issues

The problems beset Amazon Web Services on Tuesday, resulting in services like Slack, Trello and Quora reporting outages or slowdown.

Now it has emerged that human-error, a typo made during a routine debugging, was the cause of the issues.

In an online statement, Amazon said: "The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process.

"Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended."

Among those affected was Down Detector, a service which records downtime at major websites, and Nest, which tweeted that the outage was the likely cause of users' problems with its security cameras.

Amazon said it had taken measures to prevent a similar incident happening again.

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