By giving one line command with wrong parameters, a staff of Amazon could effectively turn off the S3 service (and related services based on S3 in North America) for a bunch of websites. Amazing!
The hours-long Amazon Web Services incident that knocked major sites offline and caused problems for several others on Tuesday was caused by a typo, AWS reported Thursday.
The cloud infrastructure provider issued the following explanation:
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.
Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-knocked-aws-sites-offline-because-of-typo