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Amazon says a typo caused its cloud-computing service to fail earlier this week.

On Tuesday, part of Amazon Web Services stopped working. The company's so-called simple storage service, or S3, provides features ranging from file sharing to web feeds.

, Amazon described the circumstances of the disruptive typo this way:


The company did not elaborate on what, exactly, the "authorized S3 team member" mistyped, but did say that it took about three hours to get some of the system back up, and more than four hours before the S3 system was back to normal.

 the outage "cost companies in the S&P 500 index $150 million, according to Cyence Inc., a startup that specializes in estimating cyber-risks. Apica Inc., a website-monitoring company, said 54 of the internet's top 100 retailers saw website performance slow by 20% or more."

"People reported outages and delays on services like Slack, Trello, Sprinklr, Venmo and even Down Detector, which is the site that shows where real time outages are occurring," 

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The tech site Gizmodo, whose own website was disrupted, 

 that the forum site Quora was disrupted.
Even Apple relies on the Amazon system for some of its own cloud services, and parts of its iCloud service 

Amazon said it has changed its protocol for the routine, temporary removal of servers from its system so that server capacity is taken offline more slowly, among other safeguards.

Science

Rebecca Hersher

Author

Amazon said a mistyped command caused part of the company's cloud computing service to go down for hours on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported the outage caused millions of dollars in losses.

Amazon and the $150 million typo

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