Amazon outage forces websites offline

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

An outage Tuesday at a major server for Amazon’s cloud services caused major slowdowns and forced offline thousands of popular websites across the Internet.

One of the main data storage systems for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing platform for businesses, went offline around 12.35 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time (1735GMT), according to digital monitoring firm Catchpoint Systems.

It involved AWS’ data storage system named S3, by almost 150,000 websites.

Although not all of the sites were completely taken down after S3’s outage, many loaded considerably slower. Others were apparently not effected.

Pinterest, Airbnb, Netflix, Slack, Buzzfeed and Spotify all use the S3 platform. A lot of the sites were back up after a few hours but the issue dragged on until just past 5 p.m. when Amazon declared AWS had fully recovered.

“For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing,” AWS posted on Twitter.

With S3 powering such a wide variety of websites, the outage appears to have rippled throughout the digital world.

Several reports said Amazon’s Alexa web-connected speakers have been struggling to stay online and Web-connected thermostats created by Nest also had trouble linking to the company’s app.

Ironically, Is It Down Right Now, a popular service that detects outages across the Web, was also down.

While rare, AWS outages have a major effect so many companies, from local small businesses to Silicon Valley giants, depend on the service.

In 2015, AWS went offline for five hours, an event that was roughly as disruptive as Tuesday’s outage.