IDG Contributor Network: Why Netflix didn’t sink when Amazon S3 went down

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017, a typo brought many websites and online applications to their knees. A simple human error at Amazon S3, the backend for 150,714 websites, caused an outage.The S3 billing system had been acting sluggish, and associates were trying to debug it. One of them executed a command to remove a few servers from one of the subsystems that the S3 billing process used. With the errant stroke of a finger, he or she caused collateral damage, taking out more servers than intended.