Amazon Cloud Suffers Outage; Lots of Sites Affected
Amazon Cloud, more officially known as the Amazon Web Services (AWS), suffered an outage in its Simple Storage Service (S3) web-based storage service for several hours last Feb. 28. The failure resulted in a lot of major websites that rely on Amazon's AWS to experience major issues.
Amazon offers web hosting services to 0.8 percent of the world's 1 million most visited websites, according to the numbers from web statistics site SimilarTech. Among the various services that the Amazon Web Services provide is storing and hosting images, files and data in its Simple Storage Service.
According to a report from Tech Crunch, it is the Simple Storage Service that went out last Tuesday. The culprit for the S3's sudden and unexpected malfunction? The Amazon AWS reported that there were "high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1" in its AWS service health dashboard. In the same dashboard, the web hosting provider provided an update that it was hard at work on "remediating the issue." Amazon did not follow this statement with any further details on the errors and the fixes that their engineers were doing.
While Amazon was working as quickly as it can on the S3 issue, a number of websites had already been affected. The company's storage service is being used by about 148,200 websites, and they could not function properly last Tuesday when Amazon S3 could not serve up their images and data.
As of 2:10 p.m. Pacific Time, Amazon finally made the announcement that they were able to fix their Simple Storage Service issues that were affecting the Amazon Web Service. The company declared that the systems have "recovered in terms of resolving the error rates," and the S3 service is now "operating normally."
Affected sites like Spotify, Netflix, Pinterest and Buzzfeed can now rest easy, although the incident does demonstrate how wide-ranging a problem with cloud storage can be.
