No matter how bad your week at work has been, we guarantee you’ve had it easier than one Amazon employee.
Continuing 2017’s narrative of blaming rogue members of staff for monumental disasters (sorry Moonlight) Amazon has announced that a human error was to blame for a glitch in services earlier this week.
Several high-profile websites, including Q&A forum Quora, and image hosting service Giphy, were wiped offline for hours after the hosting service that Amazon provides crashed.
The tech giant have now released a statement saying that it was a rogue typo that successfully broke the internet.
The five-hour outage began when a routine code debugging of the Amazon Web Services billing system, which serves approximately 150,000 websites, was incorrectly edited.
In an online statement, Amazon said: “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”
The fat-finger-fluke meant that a full restart of the servers had to be undertaken, which ended up taking much longer than anticipated.
The brand have now made “several changes” to the way they work as a result of the mess, and say that changes “will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future”.
Amazon aren’t the only people to have cocked-up in this way, as last year one man, Marco Marsala, deleted his entire company with one bad line of code.
Essentially what Marsala did was run a piece of code that targets, and then utterly wipes any data that it has been instructed to find.
Oops.