Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a significant part of Amazon’s business and, more importantly, a very big part of their revenues and profitability. It’s the part of Amazon that offers cloud storage and functionality for web firms. A huge number of websites and services rely on AWS.
And on Tuesday afternoon and evening they had a problem. The AWS S3 service had a wobble and a great many websites and services reported they had problems and experienced downtime. As they said on the AWS Twitter:
S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017
Amazon S3 is reportedly used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains and many will have experienced problems over the course of several hours on Tuesday. The good news is that this problem does now seem to be resolved.
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
Do you use AWS? Were you affected? The one thing that does impress is that AWS has been open, detailed and communicative in its dealing with what will have been a huge inconvenience to those impacted. But they’ve stayed in touch and, if we agree that problems are inevitable, talking is classy.
One Response
Just got off the phone to Amazon as we uploaded inventory yesterday afternoon and half the images had disappeared. Today I tried manually uploading and some worked and some didn’t.
The lady on the phone confirmed that they were having technical difficulties and were trying to fix.
Oh Joy!