AWS claims fix for 't2.micro instances' capacity issues in London data centres

Problems with t2.micro instances on Friday down to provisioning issues rather than capacity, suggests AWS

Users of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) London data centres have been dogged by capacity issues on t2.micro instances on Friday - but the company has insisted that its London data centres, which only opened in December last year, are not suffering with capacity issues.

According to sources who contacted Computing, attempts to expand their usage in the EU-West-2a zone had been rebuffed due to capacity issues: "We currently do not have sufficient t2.micro capacity in the Availability Zone you requested (eu-west-2a)."

In response, AWS admitted that there were problems with provisioning for the t2.micro instance capacity, but insisted that its London data centres weren't running short of capacity.

It later updated its service status to reflect complaints, following questions from Computing: "We are temporarily running low on t2.micro instance capacity in the EU-WEST-2 Region. All other instance types are available.

"For customers that do receive an Insufficient Capacity Error for an instance launch request, we recommend using t2.nano, t2.small, t2.medium, t2.large or any of the other instance families.

"We are working to increase t2.micro instance capacity and expect to be back to normal levels within the next few hours. Instances that are currently running are not affected."

And the company claims that it fixed the problem by 7pm on Friday.

The teething issue come weeks after AWS customers endured a an Amazon S3 server outage as a result of a technician's typo at the end of February.

Amazon's London data centres have only been open for four months - the third in Europe after Ireland and Frankfurt. The facilities are leased from third-party providers.

In addition to demand from financial services organisations in London, AWS's UK data centres will have attracted the interest of organisations seeking to cover themselves should the replacement for Safe Harbour, dubbed Privacy Shield, be struck down by the European Court of Justice.

On top of that, they also need to prepare for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will require organisations to disclose security breaches and give the ICO the power to levy fines of up to four per cent of an organisation's turnover.