14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service is having issues and, as a consequence, is breaking down countless services and websites across the Internet, as well as apps that rely on it.
For the past hour or so, Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service has been down, an issue that is currently being investigated by the folks over at Amazon.
Amazon’s AWS service health dashboard claims the outage is due to increased error rates. It seems that issues are widespread across the East Coast of the United States.
No further details were revealed regarding the problems Amazon is currently facing, whether this is an internal problem or they’re under some kind of cyber-attack.
Widespread problems
There are countless websites that are down due to Amazon’s issues, including Quora, filesharing site Slack, Grammarly, and more. Ironically, even Is It Down Right Now is down. Furthermore, connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT gadgets relying on Amazon’s services are also impacted.
According to data tracked by SimilarTech, Amazon S3 is used by over 148,000 websites, over 171,000 unique domains. It is mostly popular across the United States, but it is not limited to it. It seems that only 0.8% out of the most popular 1 million websites across the world actually use Amazon’s S3 services, as the majority seems to prefer CloudFlare instead, since 6.2% of those websites are on that particular service. Given the recent problems CloudFlare has had - ahem, Cloudbleed - the numbers might change in the future if trust is lost.
Amazon says it has managed to fix issues with its own dashboard so it can accurately display the status of their work and how much longer we have to wait for the world to go back to its previous state.
AWS has now made a full recovery, resolving the error rates it was seeing. S3 services are now operating normally.