AWS Just Took Half the Internet Down Because a Building Got Too Hot

At 00:25 UTC on the morning of May 8, one availability zone of one region of one cloud provider began to fail in a structurally interesting way. The AWS Health Dashboard describes the cause with admirable composure: a thermal event. The site of the thermal event is use1-az4 , an availability zone in the company's Northern Virginia us-east-1 region — a region that is, in The Register's preferred adjective , notorious. The hardware is off. The customer workloads that were running on the hardware a