Amazon finds the cause of its outage: A typo

Amazon.com (AMZN) on Thursday blamed human error for an outage at its cloud-services unit that caused widespread disruption to internet traffic across the U.S. earlier this week. In a post on its website, Amazon said the outage started with a typo at Amazon's North Virginia data centers Tuesday. An employee trying to speed up the company's S3 cloud-storage billing system tried to take a few servers offline. The employee mistyped the command, however, affecting more servers than intended, which led to a cascade of failures that ultimately knocked out S3 and other Amazon services. It also took longer than expected to restart certain services, Amazon said.