Amazon has finally identified the cause which led to the slowdown of multiple website this week. It all started on the Wednesday morning when a large portion of prominent website became so slow that it was painful to even watch it. Most of these websites are powered by the Amazon S3 cloud server which powers as well as helps in running those but this server was crippled and in return sites were offline for about four hours.

Amazon has done extensive investigation on this slow down issue it discovered some developer had typed in wrong command which led to this situation. The Chief Technology officer at Amazon named Werner Vogels has taken the Twitter to proclaim that eventually all forms of technology are likely to fail at some point of time and similar incident happened here.

A mistake by techie takes down the server

The command used by the techie is filled with jargon like “GET, LIST, PUT and DELETE’ requests and somewhere in between a single line command was typed in incorrectly. Amazon has also stated that the person in question was entrusted with the task of taking a certain amount of servers present in the giant cloud storage system at its Virginia facility offline.

He was following the established playbook method in order to perform the said duty. He made a slight mistake while entering the required commands and this resulted in the slowdown of the websites.

An Amazon bestseller book is behind all this

It is being speculated that the particular employee was working towards bringing a book on the Amazon which will be showcased as the next bestseller. This activity almost stuffed the internet and caused massive losses for a number of website during the period of inactivity or downtime.

A analysis conducted by Cyence has suggested that the four hour outage has resulted in losses amounting to $211 million dues to lost performance during downtime for some of the biggest companies in the world.  Another company called Apica which specializes in monitoring performance on web has reported that about 54 out of the top 100 internet retailer had been seriously affected by the outage.

Prominent website suffered huge losses

Amazon Web Servers powers some of the most popular and high frequency website in the world. Some of prominent website which went completely offline includes One Kings Lane, Express and Lululemon. Disney Store suffered slowdown whereby it was running 1165 percent slower than easier and so is true for US Target store running slow by 991 percent of original speed.

Even Nike website was slowed by 642 percent from the original speed which seriously undermined the experience of the online users. This is not the whole list some other prominent websites hit by the downtime were US Securities & Exchange Commission, Quora and Slack. Quite interestingly Amazon site was not at affected in this mayhem but Amazon was unable to make any changes on the website as it was operating at the full performance.