What You Can Learn from the AWS Tokyo Outage

Jason Yee Jason is director of advocacy at Gremlin where he helps companies build more resilient systems by learning from how they fail. He also helps lead Gremlin's internal chaos engineering practices to make it more reliable. In the movies, it seems like Tokyo is constantly facing disasters — natural ones in the forms of earthquakes and tsunamis, and unnatural ones like giant kaiju and oversized robots. On the morning of Sept. 1, the mechanized behemoth was Amazon Web Services. At around 7:30 am JST, AWS began experiencing networking issues in its AP-Northeast-1 region based in Tokyo. The outage affected business across all sectors, from financial services to retail stores, travel systems and telecommunications. Despite the troubles with not being able to access money, purchase goods, travel or call each other, the Japanese people demonstrated resilience, proving that at least some things from the movies are true. However, the financial losses due to the outage are expected to be huge. After the six-hour outage, AWS explained the issue