Major AWS outage in South Africa

Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears to be having an outage causing headaches for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) customers in its South African region.
Some report they can directly connect to existing servers but can’t log into their AWS console and select the region to make changes or spin up new servers.
However, others like Sage Accounting and uAfrica are experiencing downtime.
Independent full-stack software development consultant Tim Haak alerted MyBroadband to the issue.
Haak explained that they have a test that runs every five minutes that first detected the issue at 12:44.
Users trying to make changes to an existing server, or start up a new one, are presented with an “unauthorized” message.
“An error occurred when we tried to process your request or you are trying to access an AWS region that is not enabled for your account,” the message reads.
“Please try again in a few minutes or sign in into (sic) the US East region.”
AWS’s health dashboard shows an operational issue with its EC2 Cape Town region — AF-SOUTH-1 — that it began investigating at around 13:00 local time.
“We are experiencing elevated API errors and latency with the IAM authentication service in the AF-SOUTH-1 Region,” the health dashboard reads.
“This is causing an impact on services that require IAM authentication. We are actively investigating root cause to identify a path to mitigation.”
It also listed 59 affected AWS services, including AWS Elastic File Storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service, AWS Backup, and AWS Lambda.
These exclude three Amazon Route 53 services that were impacted and quickly resolved.
Downdetector.co.za also shows a significant spike in Amazon.com marketplace reports.
However, the outage-reporting website may be unable to differentiate between AWS and Amazon marketplace issues in South Africa.
Notably, Sage Business Cloud Accounting ZA is currently suffering a major outage.
“We are investigating a potential issue with the service. An update will be provided within 30 minutes,” its status page reads.
Sage Business Cloud Accounting ZA recently moved its operations to AWS, meaning the outage with the Amazon cloud provider is likely to blame for the issues.
Ecommerce platform provider uAfrica also sent an email to merchants using its services notifying them about an outage, saying they are aware of AWS problems in certain regions.
MyBroadband asked Amazon and Sage Business Cloud Accounting ZA for comment on the outage, but neither immediately responded. We will update the article if we receive a response.
Update — 14:24: Haak reported that his servers were back online, although the AWS console is still down.
Update — 14:28: Amazon said it is seeing an improvement in its systems’ performance.
“We are continuing to see improvement in IAM authentication and authorization API error rates, and a subsequent improvement in AWS service API availability in the AF-SOUTH-1 Region. We continue to monitor this event closely, and will do so until all services have fully recovered.”
Update — 14:39: “We are starting to see recovery of IAM authentication and authorization requests, and customers should be seeing improvements in API error rates in the AF-SOUTH-1 Region. We are continuing to monitor and work towards full recovery.”
Sage told MyBroadband that it has been providing customers updates via Sage City.
Resolved — 15:35: “Between 3:30 AM and 6:35 AM PDT, customers experienced elevated errors for API and console requests in the AF-SOUTH-1 Region due to an issue with IAM authentication and authorization, which caused elevated error rates for many AWS services in the AF-SOUTH-1 Region. This issue has been resolved and all services are now working normally.”