It’s Not Just You: Amazon AWS S3 Outage Takes Several Websites, Apps Down
In case you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States trying to access websites hosted on Amazon AWS S3, there is high chance that you may run into issues. According to Techcrunch, Amazon AWS S3 services have run into some sort of trouble, and people seem to be facing widespread issues with the service. The outage has rendered several websites partially or fully broken. Several apps based on AWS S3 have also been affected. The issue with AWS S3 was acknowledged by the Amazon Web Services Twitter handle as well in which they revealed that the service was experiencing high error rates.
S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017
The Service Health Dashboard for Amazon Web Services also confirmed the news about the increased Error Rates. A statement issued by the company at 10:33 AM PST read;
“We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3.”
This article about the AWS outage doesn't have an image because of the AWS outage. https://t.co/qTrLXbXHnJ
— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) February 28, 2017
The Twitter handle continued to post updates. A few minutes after the first tweet, a second tweet was sent out which revealed that there was something wrong with the dashboard functionality as well.
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
This was followed up with this tweet in which they claimed that dashboard had recovered.
The dashboard has recovered. You will see updates for individual services shortly.
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017
In a more recent update, the Amazon Web Services handle tweeted;
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
As we file this story, the latest update from the country was
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
As of this writing, another update was posted by Amazon on the service health dashboard. This message read;
“Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. 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.”
Amazon AWS S3 outage is breaking things for a lot of websites and apps https://t.co/WoxRnBkKTD by @etherington pic.twitter.com/eOjq1DRyuM
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) February 28, 2017
Some of the websites that were affected by the Amazon AWS S3 downtime included include Quora, Sailthru, Business Insider, Alexa, and Giphy. Other major services affected include Trello, IFTTT, and Splitwise. Several image services were also down. Ironic as it may seem, a service to check if other websites were functional, also went down thanks to the Amazon AWS S3 outage!
This is certainly not the first time that Amazon web Services have run into issues. In the past, services like Instagram, Vine, and IMDb had all run into similar issues. Other things that were also affected by the downtime included connected light bulbs, thermostats, and other IoT hardware.
Amazon is yet to reveal the cause of this outage. We will of course update this article with Amazon’s findings as and when the company decides to make them public. Were you in any way affected by this Amazon AWS S3 outage? If yes, please do share your experiences.
[Featured Image by Geralt/Pixabay]