From CNN’s David Goldman
After earlier reporting that the cause of a massive global internet outage had largely been mitigated, Amazon late Monday morning acknowledged that its cloud services that power some of the world’s most popular apps and sites are acting temperamental once again.
Despite early signs of recovery from the latest round of problems, Amazon said that the issues continue to create network connectivity wonkiness for its services that support thousands of apps and customer data.
The company doesn’t yet know the source of the issue, but it has narrowed down the possibilities as it continues to investigate.
Amazon said the latest bugginess emanated from its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) network, a virtual machine that allows customers to build cloud-based applications and quickly scale up or down the amount of computing needed to power them. Basically, a company can use EC2 to rent access to servers and computing power so it doesn’t have to invest in buying its own equipment, which can be extremely expensive technology.
The company said an internal subsystem designed to monitor how much load customers are putting on its EC2 network went haywire. In the meantime, Amazon is dialing back customers’ ability to launch new EC2 instances so it can work on mitigating the problem and help customers get back online.