Amazon finally apologises for outage

Almost a week on, retailer takes blame for EC2 outage and offers compensation

Amazon has apologised for problems it experienced with its web hosting service, EC2, almost a week after it caused outages to popular websites including Foursquare, Reddit and Quorca.

EC2, which stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, provides businesses with processing power and storage so they do not have to invest in their own datacentres.

The service went down last Thursday, but the online retailer accepted no blame at the time of the event. However, it has just provided a detailed technical explanation of the reasons for the outage.

Amazon has also offered users a 10-day cloud services credit as compensation, whether they were affected by the EC2 outage or not.

"We will provide a 10-day credit equal to 100 per cent of customers' usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected Availability Zone," said Amazon Web Services in an open letter to customers.

"These customers will not have to do anything in order to receive this credit as it will be automatically applied to their next AWS bill. Customers can see whether they qualify for the service credit by logging into their AWS Account Activity page."