Amazon reveals the cause of massive AWS outage, and it's really embarrassing

Amazon has finally revealed the cause of the lengthy outage that disrupted service to dozens of internet services for hours — and it's pretty embarrassing.

The cause, according to the company, who posted a very wordy explanation on its website Thursday, was "human error." Which sounds bad enough until you find out exactly what the "human error" was: a typo.

According to Amazon, the trouble began Tuesday morning when an employee, who was conducting routine maintenance, mistakenly entered the wrong command while trying to take "a small number of servers" offline. Instead, that command took down a "a larger set of servers," including those that support two S3 subsystems. (S3 is a data storage service used by a number of web-based services.)  Read more...