Amazon’s S3 outage temporarily killed some of the internet

The last time the internet literally lost itself was October 2016, when global DNS giant Dyn suffered a DDoS attack. That was bad, plunging a vast majority of the internet and the services we use everyday into an inaccessible mire.

Roll on four months, and now Amazon is the culprit.

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

Amazon Web Services division announced yesterday that its S3 cloud service — which allows some of the internet’s biggest websites and services to store data on the cloud — was experiencing “error rates”. That’s a a bit of an understatement.

On the client side, users couldn’t access the likes of Slack, Quora, SoundCloud, and Imgur. Cat pictures, guys! Coinbase, Adobe’s creative suite and even motoring blog Jalopnik were also affected.

Yes, some of the internet was down yesterday thanks to Amazon

“Our service provider, Amazon Web Services, is experiencing a widespread outage in their S3 storage service which is affecting all of our applications,” wrote Imgur in response to the outage.

“This directly impacts how Imgur can operate on all platforms and unfortunately means that, until it’s fixed, Imgur will not be working as intended.”

Amazon couldn’t access its health dashboard either — which keeps users informed of any outages — because it was itself hosted on S3 servers. Lol.

The likes of Slack, Quora and Imgur also took to Twitter to inform their users.

You may have noticed issues uploading files etc. Don’t worry, so have we: And we’re working as hard as we can to get things back to normal.

— Slack (@SlackHQ) February 28, 2017

The outage came to an end around 9.30pm SAST, and services largely seem to be operational once again at the time of writing.

Amazon has yet to declare exactly what caused the issue.

If you’re still having issues, do let us know in the comments section down below, or tweet us @Memeburn.

Feature image: Mike Mozart via Flickr (CC 2.0, resized)