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Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

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Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#101

Post by Syonyk »

gpm wrote: post #97
toomuchtodo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.

It's unclear to me that the app being discussed started the car? In sufficiently cold conditions, you need to warm the engine up before starting the car, with an electric heating element. If this was controlling one of those heating elements, the problem was presumably that the car wasn't able to start at all, not that the car couldn't be started remotely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater

It's probably an electric that has to warm up the battery before going anywhere in extreme cold, though 20 minutes seems short.

When I use a block heater, I let it run for a couple hours before needing the vehicle in the cold. I've got an outdoor outlet timer that I can use to start my truck's block heater around 2-3AM if I need it for something in the morning. It'll start at 0F without it, but it's exceedingly clear that it's not happy about the arrangement, so I preheat.

Whatever it is, I'm entirely unsurprised that some app or another, talking to some cloud service or another, talking to some car or another, fails silently when "impossible" things have happened. Nobody seems to consider that the cloud can fail. Even though it does, quite regularly, and reliably breaks all sorts of stuff every single time it does.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#102

Post by samstave »

hattmall wrote: post #75
toomuchtodo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.

Couldn't you also just go outside and turn on the car, like people did before remote starts.

When I was consulting in Nome AK - it was -40F outside and there were locals standing outside behind the hospitals smoking cigs...

My brother lives in Anchorage and he went hiking with his with ~week ago, and he said it was -20F (My brother was a colonel in the USAF, so not just like a weak person)

But the point is, she should have been able to just ran out to the car like other alaskans do, and not be late to work.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#103

Post by gumby »

slimsag wrote: post #18

Check out the Amazon Flex Drivers subreddit[0], there are tons of people saying they were paid for the day of deliveries without delivering any packages and told to go home. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/rb3ggn/i...

Wow, I would have expected Amazon to have stiffed them. But I guess Amazon really needs them for the last mile.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#104

Post by DantesKite »

smsm42 wrote: post #92

Something I'm not getting there. OK, one zone went down in AWS. But there supposed to be multiple ones? And if somebody knows how to use AWS so that one zone going down wouldn't knock over the whole thing, it should be Amazon? I thought the whole point of this multi-zone cloud setup would be so that even if one zone goes down, it could survive and perform as usual - maybe a little slower for a bit while backups kick…

It’s beginning to sound like a cyberattack to me.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#105

Post by kymaz »

adanto6840 wrote: post #74
ethbr0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand what's going on with this one. Transcribing the blurb from the clip, from interviewing the residents of the house: "[The people who live in the house] have a friend who has a contract with an Amazon warehouse in China. They say whenever that friend's contract expires, she will send the packages to their house for the family to sort and then send back to Amazon for the company to sell."

Right? I seriously cannot come up with any scenario where this might make sense, not even anything remotely plausible . And they're "storing" the packages, all sorts of different shapes/sizes, out in the elements?! What the heck? My curiosity is running wild & unsatisfied. =D

For some replacement computer parts and other such items shipped via FedEx to a certain remote location, all packages came with a coating of dust. Like wash your hands after receiving harddrive box, and then wash again after cutting the box open to keep the anti static bag clean. I guess if a shipping company can get away with it they will? Roofs and floors cost money.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#106

Post by throwntoday »

karmicthreat wrote: post #90

Whenever us-east-1 goes down you just get a really good feel for how many other companies also have pretty fragile setups. They apps I work on can deal with a few hours of downtime, so as long as I'm sure I can recover from getting totally leveled its ok. And I think it's that was for the majority of companies. Most don't want the extra effort and cost of failover.

I'm just surprised Amazon was not using something sectioned off from the rest of AWS.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#107

Post by jaxrtech »

notfromhere wrote: post #95
karmicthreat wrote: post #90

Whenever us-east-1 goes down you just get a really good feel for how many other companies also have pretty fragile setups. They apps I work on can deal with a few hours of downtime, so as long as I'm sure I can recover from getting totally leveled its ok. And I think it's that was for the majority of companies. Most don't want the extra effort and cost of failover.

Us-East-1 took out commuter rail travel in Chicago for like a good 30 minutes, so not just companies

> Us-East-1 took out commuter rail travel in Chicago for like a good 30 minutes, so not just companies

Was it Metra or the CTA out of curiosity?

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#108

Post by krasin »

ethbr0 wrote: post #48
caffed wrote: post #28

I thought this story was about this house x-) "Neighbors in Tennessee city worry as Amazon packages pile up outside home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVQjEB2sxBw

I don't even understand what's going on with this one. Transcribing the blurb from the clip, from interviewing the residents of the house: "[The people who live in the house] have a friend who has a contract with an Amazon warehouse in China. They say whenever that friend's contract expires, she will send the packages to their house for the family to sort and then send back to Amazon for the company to sell."

From what I understand, it's a play around the Amazon Inventory Storage fees ([1], [2]), which normally are $0.75 per cubic foot monthly, but grow to $6.90 per cubic foot, if stored for more than a year and not sold.

It's possible to ask Amazon to remove selected items from their warehouse and send to any US address for a somewhat reasonable fee of around $0.32/item ([3]).

What happens here is the Chinese sellers send packages to the residents of the house, and then relist items under a different account, so that the counter is reset and the Amazon storage fees are low again.

That said, the residents of the house run a subpar operation.

1. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G3EDYEF6KU...

2. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?...

3. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?...

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#109

Post by stormbeard »

staticassertion wrote: post #60
LAC-Tech wrote: post #7

I thought the whole point of AWS that it was a distributed system with no one point of failure? In that case, how did it have an outage?

A lot of AWS is very old and it's very hard to go back and make everything nice and reliable without breaking things when you have a shitload of customers 24/7 using your services. So yes, in theory much of AWS's services are probably very reliable and distributed across AZs and regions, but in practice there's likely a whole bunch of debt where one thing gets fucked up and it cascades.

As an AWS employee, you’re under too much artificial deadline pressure to address technical debt like this… let alone engineer a service properly in the first place.

Re: Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

#110

Post by 14 »

Weird I just ordered a package about 3-4 weeks ago and it didn’t show up so finally went to track it on amazon last week and got a message saying that they had lost the package and to request a refund. It kind of sucks because that was my mom’s Christmas gift now I have to figure out a plan B.
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