An outage at an American AWS datacenter has impacted third-party services, including Asana and Signal. The applications were unreachable for an extended period yesterday.
Update 10/21: AWS announced around 1 AM CET that the outage has been fully resolved. In total, 142 AWS services were impacted by the outage. They should now be fully operational again. A DNS error was the cause, though AWS promises to share a detailed analysis.
Original article 10/20: Planning and project management tool Asana was unreachable for several hours. The outage is still not completely resolved at this time. The application is not functioning via the desktop and mobile app, nor through the web interface. The API is also experiencing issues, though on a smaller scale.
Messaging app Signal has also experienced an outage and is not yet functioning completely properly. This is not coincidental: The cause lies with AWS. Amazon Web Services is experiencing an outage in its North Virginia datacenter (us-east-1). Amazon DynamoDB is currently unavailable there. This failure has a ripple effect, with 59 other AWS services not functioning properly in the region.
DynamoDB
Asana’s application, as well as Signal, rely on DynamoDB in the affected AWS datacenter. Although the outage only occurs in the American datacenter, the services are therefore down globally.
AWS reports that it has taken initial mitigating measures. The cause of the outage has been found and a complete solution is in development. The cloud giant indicates that requests may continue to fail until the final solution is implemented, but improvement is in sight.
Asana indicates it is also starting recovery now that DynamoDB is showing signs of life again. The problems are not resolved at the time of writing, but should not continue much longer in principle. Signal reports that everything has been repaired in the meantime. Messages appear to be sent again with some delay.
One Bug, Big Impact
The issue demonstrates how essential the services of major cloud providers are today. Even an outage in one datacenter can have consequences for a globally active SaaS provider or messaging service. Asana is a planning tool that forms an essential part of companies’ workflows. Thus, the outage of one service in one datacenter in the US causes organizations worldwide to experience problems.
This article originally appeared on October 20 and received an update with the latest information.