In this screen shot of the fousquare.com website, an apology for technical difficulties is displayed. Dozens of major websites including Foursquare, Reddit and others crashed or suffered severe slowdowns after technical problems troubled their hosting company, Amazon.com. (AP Photo/foursquare.com)
NEW YORK – Amazon.com disclosed Friday a detailed mea culpa on last week's Web services outage in which it apologized for the shutdown and offered a service credit to customers who were affected by the glitch.
Amazon, which rents web services and storage to companies, provided a nearly 5,700-word account on the causes of last week's glitch that took down a slew of websites. The company explained a network configuration change caused the shutdown and described what it is planning to do to prevent similar technical problems from happening again.
Amazon said it will provide a 10-day service credit to customers who were affected by the outage that will be automatically applied to their accounts.
"We want to apologize," the company said on its website. "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."
The outage began April 21 and lingered for several days. High-profile Internet companies such as Foursquare, Quora and Reddit cited service problems related to the outage.
Amazon said the primary outage occurred in a data center in northern Virginia when a configuration change to shift traffic was performed incorrectly. The network change was part of a normal upgrade and was intended to increase capacity of the primary network in the data center.
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