Cydia’s backend has been extensively affected by Amazon’s EC2 outage. Towards the end of last week, Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud computing service went offline and affected many heavily-trafficked services across the internet.
When EC2 went under, Cydia’s store and account infrastructure went with it. Any type of account activity remained unavailable until EC2 slowly started kicking back in over the weekend.
Cydia’s creator and admin, saurik, has posted an update to Cydia’s homepage explaining the issues that Cydia has been experiencing for the past 84+ hours.
“Amazon EC2, which hosts Cydia’s internal website, has been having extreme issues for – 40 hours. This outage affects the ability to purchase paid products, the Theme Center, and Manage Account. I (saurik) have been sleeping in hour-and-a-half shifts since this outage began in order to keep a dialog open with Amazon “Premium Support” regarding this issue. Recently, enough access was recovered in order for me to modify the home page to add this message.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s status and ETAs have been confusingly vague and highly optimistic throughout the experience, causing me to be unable to make good decisions about disaster recovery choices. At this time, the latest news from Amazon AWS (as of two hours ago) was “that this will take 3-4 hours until full access is restored.” Meanwhile, Premium Support has asked engineering to prioritize recovering Cydia’s infrastructure. (For those interested in this sort of thing: this is the same Amazon EC2 outage that has been affecting other sites like reddit and foursquare.)
I (saurik) have been sleeping in hour-and-a-half shifts since this outage began in order to keep a dialog open with Amazon “Premium Support” regarding this issue. At some point, enough access was recovered in order for me to modify the home page to add this message.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s status and ETA’s have been confusingly vague and highly optimistic throughout the experience, causing me to be unable to make good decisions and disaster recovery choices. Premium Support has managed to get my backend databases, both the Whole Package Index and payment database, online. I commend their ability to put up with someone who has gotten so little sleep as myself.
Unfortunately, Cydia is currently operating “below capacity,” and is not keeping up with user demand. I am looking into this issue currently and imagine that this will smooth out as my data is recached to RAM.”
If you’re getting a lot of “HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden” errors in Cydia, now you know why. Package upgrades and all other account-related activities are affected by this EC2 outage.
We commend saurik for giving up his sleep to make sure Cydia is operating as smoothly as it can. Hopefully this Amazon EC2 problem won’t last much longer.
Let’s show the jailbreak community some love in the comments below!
UPDATE: It appears that Cydia is finally back online and working smoothly. A huge thanks to saurik for his dedication.
