Amazon Web Services has explained what happened that caused numerous web sites and other Internet services to go down on Wednesday. It was basically, as CNET News phrased it “a typo.”
In a blog post, Amazon said:
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. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.
These subsystems affected other systems and, hence, the problems. But I’m giving you the ‘Readers Digest’ version. If you want the full story, read the Amazon post or the CNET News story.