Website developers utilizing Amazon Web Services were not alone in experiencing notable slowdowns on Friday morning, as an encryption key storage service experienced a period of technical difficulty that led to connectivity issues in some of Amazon’s availability zones. According to an article from Information Week, the slowdown had to do with the Hardware Security Module appliance, a component of Amazon Web Services that caused slowdowns for some clients over an hour-and-18-minute window.

For those unfamiliar with it, Amazon Web Services is a platform launched in 2006 by the company to provide remote computing services. Companies and website developers looking to outsource their information storage have used the Amazon Web Services platform as a cloud-based server farm. The platform is much cheaper for web developers than purchasing and maintain their own physical server farms, and Amazon’s trusted brand has only made the Amazon Web Services platform that much more popular.

The Hardware Security Module is a component of Amazon’s cloud services and is generally utilized to store encryption keys within Amazon Web Services. By storing these keys in an accessible location, Amazon is able to facilitate quick access to servers and other Amazon Web Services offerings. When the Hardware Security Module began to malfunction, however, this easy access encryption storage was disrupted and services were slowed considerably.

The slowdowns and malfunctions mostly impacted Amazon Web Services clients in the eastern United States, as the Hardware Security Module difficulties centered upon Amazon’s US-East availability zone based in northern Virginia.

Apparently, the slowdowns affected numerous Amazon services, including EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Simple Email Service, Elastic Load Balancing, Relational Database Service, and a Redshift data warehouse service. Most casual Amazon customers won’t recognize most of these terms, but the majority of them are computing resources used by the internet marketplace to support enterprise cloud services. In other words, those simply shopping Amazon.com for books or movies probably noticed no issue. Those trying to access their Amazon S3 account (Simple Storage Service), or websites and companies that use Amazon Web Services for their own cloud or server offerings, were likely impacted by the technical difficulties.

Friday’s slowdown, while undoubtedly an annoyance for Amazon Web Service clients, was not entirely unheard of. The platform has experienced a few well-publicized periods of downtime or technical difficulty over the years.

Interested in learning more about Amazon Web Services? Check out the platform’s official website here.