Last week’s blackout of Amazon’s Web Services ^[1] caused expensive and exasperating traffic halts to many prominent sites such as Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite. However, according to Mashable, Amazon has finally issued a formal apology ^[2] and lengthy explanation ^[3] of how the outage occurred, why the system failed, and what Amazon plans to do to prevent similar issues in the future.

Amazon’s prevention plan involves offering customers Availability Zones, which are independent, sequestered server clusters in the cloud which would be unaffected by failures in other zones. “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,” read the post from the AWS team. Read more from Mashable ^[2].