A large swath of the Internet that depends on the cloud computing of Amazon Web Services went down Tuesday, becoming a headache for companies around the U.S.
At the center of the issue is Amazon’s S3 storage service on the East Coast, which hosts data, including images, that many websites and apps depend on. Though the company hasn’t said what caused the problem, it did put out an update at 11:35 a.m. PT that said engineers believe they understand the “root cause” of the outage and “are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.”
By 1:49 p.m. PT, Amazon reported that “we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.”
Websites including Pinterest, Adobe services, Airbnb, Netflix, Slack and Spotify have all experienced technical issues.
News websites too seemed to be experiencing issues, including some Gannett systems and Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed tech reporter Blake Montgomery resorted to tweeting out a draft of his writeup on the outage because Buzzfeed was unable to publish new stories.
Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage is down on the East Coast. Translation: a lot of the internet isn’t working rn. pic.twitter.com/PkgWxsYO5h
— BuzzFeed Tech (@fwd) February 28, 2017
“This is a pretty big outage,” Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester, a tech advisory firm, according to USA Today. “AWS had not had a lot of outages and when they happen, they’re famous. People still talk about the one in September of 2015 that lasted five hours,” he said.
Even DownDetector.com, a website dedicated to sharing the status of websites that are experiencing technical issues, was down due to technical issues.
sorry all. current #AWSdown brought down https://t.co/XYZ5iegXtd. We’re curled up on the floor in a fetal position until its over pic.twitter.com/lErFYzvX5m
— DownDetector (@downdetector) February 28, 2017
