NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. apologized yesterday for a data center outage that brought down major websites including Foursquare and Reddit and offered Web services customers a 10-day credit.
The company isn’t disclosing how much the credit will cost it. Amazon Web Services accounts for only a few percent of Amazon’s total revenue.
The outage at the data center outside Washington was a major stumble for the service. Amazon is still restoring some of the computers brought down in the incident, which began eight days ago.
In a post-mortem report yesterday, Seattle-based Amazon said human error set off the outage. An automated error-recovery mechanism then went out of control, and many computers became “stuck’’ in recovery mode.
The service is set up in a way that’s supposed to provide redundancy. Amazon said that customers that were properly set up to run their computing tasks over multiple zones were largely unaffected, but that the error made it difficult to switch zones on the fly. It’s making changes to prevent the error from recurring.
