Update: AWS cloud storage back online after outage cripples popular sites

(Shutterstock Image).

An outage of Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3) impacted sites across the internet Tuesday. Continue reading for our story and updates as events unfolded.

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UPDATE: 2:15 p.m.: Amazon Web Services has fixed all the issues related to the cloud storage outage Tuesday. Here is the latest message from the service health dashboard: “As of 1:49 p.m. Pacific, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.”

UPDATE 1:00 p.m.: It appears Amazon is close to fixing the problem as it posted the following message on the service health dashboard with expectation that the number of errors are expected to decrease in the next hour: “We are seeing recovery for S3 object retrievals, listing and deletions. We continue to work on recovery for adding new objects to S3 and expect to start seeing improved error rates within the hour.”UPDATE 1:20 p.m.: The online world is starting to spin again as Amazon is fixing the problems that caused “high error rates” at its data centers in Virginia, knocking out many prominent websites and apps Tuesday morning. Here is the latest update: “S3 object retrieval, listing and deletion are fully recovered now. We are still working to recover normal operations for adding new objects to S3.”

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UPDATE: The outage remains ongoing, but Amazon Web Services has fixed the issue with the service health dashboard, which was previously not showing the Simple Storage Service outage. The company also believes it has identified the cause of the outage.

Here is the latest update from AWS:

Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.

Here is a look at the now updated service health dashboard, which displays all the incidents.

A screenshot of the issues affecting Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Services. (Screenshot Via Amazon Web Services)

Original story below.

Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service, its cloud storage program, started experiencing “high error rates” at data centers in Northern Virginia just before 10 a.m. Pacific Tuesday morning, knocking down service to many of the countless websites and applications that use AWS such as Expedia, Slack, Medium and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The outage appears to be affecting the AWS service health dashboard, as it shows no outages currently. Amazon adjusted by posting a special message at the top of the site that reads as follows: “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3.”

In an ironic twist, some websites dedicated to telling people when sites are down … are down.

Amazon is the king of cloud computing, capturing more than 40 percent of the market, according to a recent report. AWS topped $12 billion in sales for the year, up 55 percent from the same period last year, blowing past a goal of reaching $10 billion in sales in 2016.

That said, the internet is not happy with the outage and people are venting their frustrations on Twitter. Others seem to be embracing the outage, terming it a “digital snow day.”