November 29, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] Amazon Web Service’s cloud services in Seoul went down in the morning on Nov. 22, making the online services of its customers, ranging from e-commerce firms to banks, inaccessible for a couple of hours.

The AWS servers here went down at around 9 a.m. and got back on track at around 11 a.m.

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During the two-hour server outage, companies relying solely on AWS suffered connectivity issues with their respective online services.

AWS’ clients include delivery service firm Baemin, e-commerce giant Coupang, accommodation booking site Yanolja, crypto exchange Upbit, game company Smailegate, financial firm KB Financial Group and banking firm Shinhan Bank.

“We had a misconfiguration in our Korea region for some of our DNS servers that prevented DNS resolution from EC2 instances for 84 minutes today. The configuration error has been fixed and services are operating normally,” the US cloud services provider said in a statement.

DNS resolution indicates a process to translate numeric IP addresses to alphabetical domain names while EC2 is one of AWS’ services that provides virtual computing capacity for customers in the cloud.

The US firm did not specify how it would compensate its clients for the server outage.

The Korean companies whose operations suffered due to the server error are likely to discuss the compensation issue, according to some of the clients.

“This kind of server error was unprecedented. Since we have a number of customers who trade their crypto assets on our platform, the damage was huge,” said an official from a local crypto exchange operator.

Some sources said AWS could allow its clients to use their cloud services for free for a certain period of time instead of giving them monetary compensation.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)