"AWS outages"--AWS is investigating S3 issues, affecting Quora, Slack, Trello (updated)

Above: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Image Credit: Thomas Cloer/Flickr

Cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today confirmed that it’s looking into issues with its widely used S3 storage service in the major us-east-1 region of data centers in Northern Virginia. Other services are affected as well.

“We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said at the top of its status page.

The issues appear to be affecting Adobe’s services, Amazon’s Twitch, Atlassian’s Bitbucket and HipChat, Autodesk Live and Cloud Rendering, Buffer, Business Insider, Carto, Chef, Citrix, Clarifai, Codecademy, Coindesk, Convo, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Elastic, Expedia, Expensify, FanDuel, FiftyThree, Flipboard, Flippa, Giphy, GitHub, GitLab, Google-owned Fabric, Greenhouse, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, Imgur, Ionic, isitdownrightnow.com, Jamf, JSTOR, Kickstarter, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Mapbox, Medium, Microsoft’s HockeyApp, the MIT Technology Review, MuckRock, New Relic, News Corp, OrderAhead, PagerDuty, Pantheon, Quora, Razer, Signal, Slack, Sprout Social, Square, StatusPage (which Atlassian recently acquired), Talkdesk, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The Verge, Vermont Public Radio, VSCO, Wix, Xero, and Zendesk, among other things. Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat’s Bitmoji, and Time Inc. are currently working slowly.

Apple is acknowledging issues with its App Stores, Apple Music, FaceTime, iCloud services, iTunes, Photos, and other services on its system status page, but it’s not clear they’re attributable to today’s S3 difficulties.

Parts of Amazon itself also seems to be facing technical problems at the moment. Ironically, it’s restricting AWS’ ability to show errors.

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

AWS outages do happen from time to time. In 2015 an outage lasted five hours. And AWS plays an increasingly prominent role in the finances of Amazon; in the fourth quarter it yielded $926 million in operating income and $3.53 billion in revenue for its parent company.

Update at 10:30 a.m. Pacific: AWS has provided slightly more information about the S3 outage. “We’ve identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue,” AWS said on its status page.

Update at 10:51 a.m. Pacific: AWS has another S3 status update. “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3,” AWS said on the status page.

Update at 11:40 a.m. Pacific: A bit of good news from Amazon. “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue,” AWS said on the status page.

Update at 11:52 a.m. Pacific: Among the services based out of Northern Virginia that are affected today, according to the status page, are Athena, CloudWatch, EC2, Elastic File System, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Kinesis Analytics, Redshift, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Email Service (SES0, Simple Workflow Service, WorkDocs, WorkMail, CodeBuild, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk (EBS), Key Management Service (KMS), Lambda, OpsWorks, Storage Gateway, and WAF (web application firewall). Yikes, that’s a lot.

Update at 11:59 a.m. Pacific: AppStream, CloudWatch, Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Kinesis Firehose, WorkSpaces, CloudFormation, CodePipeline are also dealing with issues now, according to the status page.

Update at 12:06 p.m. Pacific: Some more services are down now. We’ve got API Gateway, CloudSearch, Cognito, the EC2 Container Registry, ElastiCache, the Elasticsearch Service, Glacier cold storage, Lightsail, Mobile Analytics, Pinpoint, Certificate Manager, CloudTrail, Config, Data Pipeline, Mobile Hub, and QuickSight. Wow.

Update at 12:15 p.m. Pacific: Added information on issues affecting Apple.

Update at 12:51 p.m. Pacific: On its status page, Trello just said that “S3 services appear to be slowly coming back up now.”

Update at 12:52 p.m. Pacific: And now we hear from AWS! “We are seeing recovery for S3 object retrievals, listing and deletions. We continue to work on recovery for adding new objects to S3 and expect to start seeing improved error rates within the hour,” AWS said on its status page.

Update at 1:19 p.m. Pacific: Things are looking better now. “S3 object retrieval, listing and deletion are fully recovered now. We are still working to recover normal operations for adding new objects to S3,” AWS said.

Update at 2:35 p.m. Pacific: The S3 problems have been resolved! “As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally,” Amazon said in a 2:08 p.m. update. But several other AWS services are still having problems.

Update at 6:38 p.m. Pacific: Almost all the services affected in today’s outage are back up and running. CloudTrail, Config, and Lambda are still not fixed.

Update at 10:16 p.m. Pacific: The status now indicates that all of today’s issues have been resolved. Back to work, everyone, move along.

Apple might be looking to bring USB-C support to the iPhone: Report

By tech2 News Staff /  01 Mar 2017 , 09:05

A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Apple is bringing USB-C to the iPhone. It’s surprising news, given Apple’s traditional reluctance to adopt standardised ports on its iPhone.

Before you get your hopes up, however, The Verge does add that the WSJ report’s wording is not very clear. The report could be interpreted to suggest that Apple is not dumping Lightning in favour of USB-C, but that it’s replacing the USB-A end of the connector with USB-C.

The latter assumption makes more sense because Apple very “courageously” dumped all USB-A ports on its current MacBook lineup and replaced them with USB-C, without taking the trouble to provide adapters.

If you buy a MacBook and an iPhone today, it’s impossible to connect the two without buying at least one adapter.

Another pointer for the latter assumption is that Apple has only recently released its Lightning EarPods and has licensed the ports to accessory makers for making Lightning-compatible headphones and accessories.

USB-C is a better standard than USB 3.0 because it supports a much higher bandwidth and, more importantly, can handle far more power.

Moving to USB-C will lend Apple users at least some peace of mind, as they won’t have to purchase adapters to hook up their iPhones to their MacBooks.

It’ll be certainly be a welcome change if Apple decides to dump Lightning for USB-C, but that’s likely a very remote possibility.

Total number of internet domain names jumps to 329.3 million in fourth quarter of 2016

Image Credit: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

  01 Mar 2017 , 19:09

Nearly 2.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to 329.3 million, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

According to VeriSign, a global leader in domain names and internet security, the total number of domain name registrations are across all top-level domains (TLDs), as of December 31 last year.

“The increase of approximately 2.3 million domain name registrations globally equates to a growth rate of 1.8 percent over the third quarter of 2016. Domain name registrations have grown by 21 million, or 6.8 percent, year over year,” the report titled ‘Domain Name Industry Brief’ said.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 142.2 million domain name registrations in the domain name base in the fourth quarter of 2016. This represents a 1.7 percent increase year over year.

“As of December 31, the .com domain name base equaled 126.9 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base equaled 15.3 million domain name registrations,” the report added.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 8.8 million during the fourth quarter of 2016. In the fourth quarter of 2015, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 12.2 million.

During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 143 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 398 billion queries.

NSA fears talent drain as low morale and worries about Trump’s leadership take toll

  01 Mar 2017 , 19:21

The National Security Agency (NSA) risks a brain-drain of hackers and cyber spies due to a tumultuous reorganization and worries about the acrimonious relationship between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump, according to current and former NSA officials and cybersecurity industry sources. Half-a-dozen cybersecurity executives told Reuters they had witnessed a marked increase in the number of U.S. intelligence officers and government contractors seeking employment in the private sector since Trump took office on January 20.

One of the executives, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said he was stunned by the caliber of the would-be recruits. They are coming from a variety of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies, multiple executives said, and their interest stems in part from concerns about the direction of U.S intelligence agencies under Trump.

Retaining and recruiting talented technical personnel has become a top national security priority in recent years as Russia, China, Iran and other nation states and criminal groups have sharpened their cyber offensive abilities. NSA and other intelligence agencies have long struggled to deter some of their best employees from leaving for higher-paying jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The problem is especially acute at NSA, current and former officials said, due to a reorganization known as NSA21 that began last year and aims to merge the agency’s electronic eavesdropping and domestic cyber-security operations.

The two-year overhaul includes expanding parts of NSA that deal with business management and human resources and putting them on par with research and engineering. The aim is to “ensure that we’re using all of our resources to maximum effect to accomplish our mission,” NSA Director Mike Rogers said. The changes include new management structures that have left some career employees uncertain about their missions and prospects. Former employees say the reorganization has failed to address widespread concerns that the agency is falling behind in exploiting private-sector technological breakthroughs.

A former top NSA official said he had been told by three current officials that budget problems meant there was too little money for promotions. That is especially important for younger employees, who sometimes need two jobs to make ends meet in the expensive Washington D.C. area, the official said. “Morale is as low as I’ve ever seen it,” said another former senior NSA official, who maintains close contact with current employees.

Asked about the risk of losing talent from NSA and other agencies, White House spokesman Michael Anton said Trump had sought to reassure the intelligence community by visiting the CIA headquarters on his first full day in office. Anton also pointed to the military spending increase in Trump’s budget proposal released on Monday.

It will likely take more than a visit to the CIA to patch up relations with the intelligence community, the current and former officials said. Trump has attacked findings from intelligence agencies that Russia hacked emails belonging to Democratic Party operatives during the 2016 presidential campaign to help him win, though he did eventually accept the findings. In January, Trump accused intelligence agencies of leaking false information and said it was reminiscent of tactics used in Nazi Germany.

How many?

The breadth of any exodus from the NSA and other intelligence agencies is difficult to quantify. The NSA has “seen a steady rise” in the attrition rate among its roughly 36,000 employees since 2009, and it now sits at a “little less than six percent,” according to an NSA spokesman. NSA director Michael Rogers said last year that the attrition rate was 3.3 percent in 2015, suggesting a sharp jump in departures since then.

Several senior NSA officials who have left or plan to leave, including deputy director Richard Ledgett and the head of cyber defence, Curtis Dukes, have said their departures were unrelated to Trump or the reorganization. Some turnover is normal with any new administration, government and industry officials noted, and a stronger economy has also improved pay and prospects in the private sector.

“During this time the economy has been recovering from the recession, unemployment rates have been falling and the demand for highly skilled technical talent has been increasing,” an NSA spokesman said, when asked to comment on the reports of employee departures. In a statement, Kathy Hutson, NSA’s chief of human resources, said the agency continues “to attract amazing talent necessary to conduct the security mission the nation needs.”

Controversial Boss

Some NSA veterans attribute the morale issues and staff departures to the leadership style of Rogers, who took over the spy agency in 2014 with the task of dousing an international furore caused by leaks from former contractor Edward Snowden. Concern about Rogers reached an apex last October, when former Defense Secretary Ash Carter and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recommended to then-President Barack Obama that Rogers be removed.

The NSA did not respond to a request for comment on the recommendation last fall that Rogers be replaced. Rogers is now expected to retain his job at NSA for at least another year, according to former officials. Rogers acknowledged concerns about potential morale problems last month, telling a congressional committee that Trump’s broadsides against the intelligence community could create “a situation where our workforce decides to walk.”

Trump’s criticism of the intelligence community has exacerbated the stress caused by the reorganization at the NSA, said Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer now with Brookings Institution. The “tone coming from the White House makes an already difficult situation worse, by eroding the sense of common purpose and service,” she said. A wave of departures of career personnel, Hennessey added, “would represent an incalculable loss to national security.”

Reuters

The 2017 GTA Online Stunt Race Event is finally live; get ready for a bunch of new tracks and updates

Image: Rockstar Games

By tech2 News Staff /  02 Mar 2017 , 09:10

The ‘2017 GTA Online Stunt Race Event’ is live. As Rockstar Games puts it, suit up, strap in and get ready!

The event features a bunch of brand new races to participate in as well as double GTA$, the in-game currency, and RP.

Rockstar Games, the creators of GTA Online, describe it as such, “You’ll race up glass towers, plummet through clouds, dodge turbines and clatter though bowling pins on your way to the finish line.” The races will show up on the map and can also be individually bookmarked on Social Club.

Bonuses include a Pink Stunt jumpsuit just for logging in before 13 March and a 15 percent discount on the vehicles and clothing options from last year’s ‘Cunning Stunts’ update, including the Annis RE-7B, the Emperor ETR1, Vapid Desert Raid, Vapid Trophy Truck and more.

Vehicle Warehouses will also get a 25 percent discount.

The race schedules are also out. Premium races will run from 28 February to 6 March for Super class vehicles. Another set of races for Sports class vehicles will run from 7 March to 13 March.

Time trials will run from 27 February to 5 March and from 6 March to 12 March.

So what are you waiting for? The races have already started. Fire up your GTA V install, make sure it’s updated and start playing!