Amazon Outage Takes Down Large Segments of the Internet on Tuesday

See below for update.

We know Amazon by the products it sells, but a huge part of their multi-faceted business is providing web hosting services under the name of Amazon Web Services, known as AWS. Because of its low cost, ease of expansion, and high performance, thousands of businesses use it.

But today part of their service has gone down, causing many other sites to go down as well. Amazon has confirmed the problem, noting high error rates in one of its regions.

“We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.”

According to some reports on Reddit, S3 in US-WEST may also be experiencing outages.

S3 is the abbreviation for Amazon Simple Storage Service.

The number of online sites down include Instagram, Quora, IFTTT, The Verge, and hundreds more. So if you are unable to reach a site, it’s not your computer. Amazon says it’s working to correct the problem, but has no estimate of when it will be corrected.

You can go to Amazon’s AWS dashboard to check the status.

Here are AWS’s tweets related to the issue: 

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

Will update Twitter on this handle as we have new information.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

The dashboard has recovered. You will see updates for individual services shortly.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-East-1, which is impacting some other AWS services.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing. Future updates across all services will be on dashboard.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

Update 8:56 p.m. EST: Amazon’s outage has now been fixed. Amazon reported that its service has been completely restored, more than four hours after the problem began.

As of 1:49 PM PST, 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.