AWS’s S3 Brought Down by Single Typo in a Server Command

The problems Feb. 28 caused more than 150,000 websites and apps to become unavailable, while others indicated broken links and images. A single mistyped server command during a routine debugging of its billing system in Amazon Web Services’ northern Virginia data center turned out to be cause of a huge outage Feb. 28 that stilled an estimated 150,000 websites and/or business services for about half the day.