Fedora Project's RHEL yum repo has been throwing errors since yesterday UPDATED

A few of my Red Hat servers run cron jobs to check for updates. starting yesterday (Thursday October 1st, 2015) at around 3PM I encountered 503 unavailable errors when attempting to contact a Fedora Project URL that hosts the metalink for the rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases repository - a core RHEL repository for EC2.

Could not get metalink https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=x86_64 error was
14: HTTPS Error 503 - Service Unavailable

3 hours later or so, the URL began responding again, but the problems remained. `yum` now reports corrupted update announcements from the repo:

Update notice RHSA-2014:0679 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
You should report this problem to the owner of the rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases repository.
Update notice RHSA-2014:1327 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHEA-2015:0372 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:0335 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHEA-2015:0371 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:0416 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:0303 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:0556 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:0290 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:0596 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:0578 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:0716 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:1115 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHBA-2015:1533 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:1586 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.
Update notice RHSA-2015:1705 (from rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases) is broken, or a bad duplicate, skipping.

I sent a tweet to Fedora to hopefully get some feedback. Because this wasn't a super critical issue I've been slacking on troubleshooting as well I will update here and/or provide a new post with more info.

UPDATE: I am increasingly convinced that this is an error with the repository and not something with my server. Check out the following command output:

Nothing marked as out of sync:

# yum distro-sync
Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb
No packages marked for distribution synchronization

No problems listed by `package-cleanup`:

#package-cleanup --problems
Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb
No Problems Found

`yum check` finds nothing:

# yum check
Not loading "rhnplugin" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "amazon-id" plugin
Not loading "product-id" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "rhui-lb" plugin
Not loading "subscription-manager" plugin, as it is disabled
Config time: 0.012
Yum version: 3.4.3
rpmdb time: 0.000
check all

The cache has been cleaned (repeatedly):

# yum clean all
Not loading "rhnplugin" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "amazon-id" plugin
Not loading "product-id" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "rhui-lb" plugin
Not loading "subscription-manager" plugin, as it is disabled
Config time: 0.021
Yum version: 3.4.3
Cleaning repos: epel rhui-REGION-client-config-server-7 rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional rhui-REGION-rhel-server-releases rhui-REGION-rhel-server-rh-common
Cleaning up everything

No orphans:

# package-cleanup --orphans
Not loading "rhnplugin" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "amazon-id" plugin
Not loading "product-id" plugin, as it is disabled
Loading "rhui-lb" plugin
Not loading "subscription-manager" plugin, as it is disabled
Config time: 0.012
Setting up Package Sacks
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/supplementary/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/extras/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rh-common/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/supplementary/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rhscl/1/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/rhui-client-config/rhel/server/7/x86_64/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rhscl/1/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rhscl/1/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/extras/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/optional/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/optional/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/supplementary/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/debug
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/optional/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/extras/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rh-common/os
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/rh-common/source/SRPMS
mirrorlist: https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/os
pkgsack time: 0.327
rpmdb time: 0.000
atomic-release-1.0-19.el7.art.noarch

By default, EC2 instances automatically repopulate mirrorlist URLs configured in /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo files using the region in which the instance is hosted, like this:

mirrorlist=https://rhui2-cds01.REGION.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/mirror/content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/$releasever/$basearch/os

I've manually updated the relevant .repo file with my region and upped the debugging level variables for yum-cron to try to narrow things down a bit. No answers yet ...

LATEST UPDATE (11-19): I believe I somewhat figured this out quite a while ago, but I just haven't had the time to update this post.

Amazon manages the licensing information for EC2 instances with operating systems that require it - like Windows and RHEL. So, the short answer is: Amazon broke it. I can't remember off-hand what the licensing agreement is in relation to this particular issue. I do know that I was still paying the exorbitant monthly rate for an RHEL-licensed instance. And I certainly received no notification that my RHEL license was expiring.

This was a very bad experience. The fact is, there are very few reasons why a non-enterprise scale user would ever use RHEL as opposed to CentOS. For Enterprise users that do require licensing, I would highly recommend looking into a Satellite-based updating solution. I'm not sure ATM what the logistics of doing such a thing using a platform like Amazon, but I am sure to be doing my homework on the subject shortly.