Japanese Banks and Airlines Disrupted by Amazon Cloud Service Outage

The news site The Japan Times reports that on Thursday 2nd September, Amazon Web Services Inc. experienced a glitch in its Japan cloud operations which disrupted the srevices of a variety of online brokerage banks and airlines. The glitch was caused by the breakdown of a network connectivity device, which was fixed on Thursday afternoon.

Among the range of oline banks affected by this outage, Matsui Securities Co., Rakuten Securities Inc. and SBI Securities Co. suffered delays in receiving and distributing stock quotations, while customers were unable to log in. Mizuho Bank’s smartphone apps experienced problems connecting.

A ticket issuing system in Haneda Airport (Tokyo) run by All Nippon Airways Co. was disrupted, as was Japan Airlines Co.’s air cargo weight management system. Passenger flights remained unaffected.

Beyond airlines and banks, the Meteorological Agency was hit by delays in data updates on their website, and popular mobile phone carrier NTT Docomo Inc. also experienced disruptions from the outage. This was not Amazon Web Services Inc.’s first major outage; two years ago, another systems failure pulled online games and phone payment apps out of service.

Read the article Amazon cloud service outage in Japan disrupts brokerages, banks and airlines at The Japan Times