​Amazon Web Services Sydney suffers outage

Amazon Web Services' Sydney service suffered connectivity issues over the weekend, with the company working until Monday morning to recover the problem.

While AWS has not confirmed what the cause of the issue was and whether it was related to the severe storms that tore through Sydney, the company reported it was experiencing issues via its service health dashboard over the weekend, saying that on June 4 a "significant" number of EC2 instances and EBS volumes with the AP-Southeast-2 region experienced a loss of power.

"Beginning at this same time, EC2 API calls in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region experienced increased error rates and latencies as well as delays in propagation of instance state data in the affected Availability Zone," it stated.

Within an hour of the power loss, AWS reported it restored power to the facility, noting it was able to recover a majority of the affected instances, all but a small number of instances and volumes that were taking longer to recover.

"We continue to investigate connectivity issues for some instances in a single Availability Zone and increased API error rates for the EC2 APIs in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region," the company wrote in an update yesterday.

AWS advised customers that were still experiencing problems to launch replacement instances for immediate recovery.

Domino's Pizza confirmed with ZDNet that due to the AWS outage its online systems also went down, but said it was able to recover its systems "a lot quicker", and was up and running within two hours.

Similarly, Foxtel Play, Foxtel Go, and Stan were impacted by the outage, but a spokesperson from both companies have said they have since recovered from it.

But Domino's Pizza and Foxtel were not the only ones working on recovering its services.

Westpac reported its fingerprint access on its mobile banking app was down, encouraging customers to instead sign in with their customer number and password.

Westpac has confirmed that while the issue has since been restored, the issue was not connected to the AWS outage.

"While we aim to ensure continuity of our systems, the severe storm system created disruptions across our network which impacted our services," Westpac said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Bank of Queensland notified customers on Twitter that its ATM and Eftpos system was down, saying it was generated by a third party provider and it was an issue affecting multiple banks.

"On Sunday BOQ customers were impacted by an outage affecting one of our third party suppliers. The supplier experienced a nationwide ATM and POS link outage due to power failure at their main site," the bank, clarifying it does not source its services for its payments system from AWS.

The same issue was also faced by Me Bank and IMB Bank that left many shoppers stranded without the ability to make cash withdrawals or use their bank card to make Eftpos payments.

Others such as the Commonwealth Bank were luckier and did not suffer any disruptions to its services including NetBank, CommBank app, or Eftpos system. However, the bank has noted customers did suffer some issues over the weekend related to another Eftpos provider.

"Some Commonwealth Bank customers were affected by intermittent issues with another Eftpos provider yesterday but all Commonwealth Bank Eftpos, NetBank and CommBank app services were not affected by any incident," a Commonwealth Bank spokesperson said.

ZDNet has reached out to AWS and its potentially affected customers for additional comment.

Updated 2.38pm AEST 6 June, 2016: Clarification that Westpac was not affected by the AWS outage, and information from Stan and Bank of Queensland has been added.