Amazon issues ten days credits for cloud outage

Amazon.com has apologised to customers for an outage at its Web Services business that caused some websites to crash, promising it would credit them for their inconvenience.

On April 21, services to some of Amazon's customers were disturbed because of technical problems that the company disclosed in a lengthy document released on Friday.

The company said in a blog posting that the bulk of its customers had their systems restored by April 24, but that a small amount of data had yet to be recovered.

"We want to apologise," the company said in the blog posting. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services."

Amazon.com said it would give affected customers a 10-day credit foruse of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances running specifically in the Availability Zone (data centre) affected.

AWS customers usually have to send server request logs to prove eligibility for credits, but the company said that on this occasions it would automatically apply the credit on the next AWS bill.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn).