Customers of Amazon’s cloud feel a little rain

A handful of Korean e-commerce services and cryptocurrency exchanges had connection problems Thursday morning due a glitch with Amazon Web Services, their cloud service provider.

Companies that had problems connecting for about an hour from around 8:30 a.m. included Coupang, Market Kurly, Baedal Minjok, Yanolja as well as the majority of cryptocurrency exchanges such as Upbeat and Coinone.

Bitthumb and Korbit operated normally as they use a different cloud provider.

Customers were unable to visit web sites and services, and saw an error message reading “502 Bad Gateway.” Service was restored between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Amazon Web Services told its clients it was conducting an emergency inspection after network problems occurred in Korea, Japan and China in a notification to users.

Upbeat said that it would cancel orders that were made before and after the connection error. It noted that cryptocurrencies traded on the exchange remain safe.

A spokeswoman from Coupang, an e-commerce firm that runs both a website and a mobile app, said its shoppers were blocked for about two hours and that the company is looking into the amount of damages.

Amazon Web Services hasn’t come up with any explanation about the problem on its homepage or discussed compensation for companies affected.

The American tech giant said through its PR agency that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a type of a product, couldn’t perform DNS functions for 84 minutes due to a partial DNS server setting error in Seoul. The error was corrected but the company did not issue an apology.

Amazon Web Services entered Korea in 2013 and opened a data center for Seoul in 2016, its 12th in the world.

The cloud service provider is No. 1 in the world, holding 34 percent of the cloud market share as of the third quarter, according to Synergy Research Group.

Microsoft held 13 percent, followed by IBM’s 7 percent and Google’s 6 percent.

BY SEO JI-EUN [seo.jieun@joongang.co.kr]