A number of large, popular, websites and some apps have been down or crippled today due to an outage of Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service’s US-EAST-1 network.
Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard itself was affected by the issues, according to Amazon. On the dashboard, they state that they have “…now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard.”
Consumer Press first noticed the outage at approximately 1:40pm Eastern Time as we attempted to access FreeLancer.com.
Other sites that are affected include Quora.com, BusinessInsider.com, Assembla.com, Slack.com, Trello.com, Collectival.com, Marinas.com, Flippa.com, and others. There are also reports of internet connected light bulbs, thermostats, and other IoT devices being affected, along with apps such as InVision and Strava.
Though there are reports on Twitter of the AWS service in Europe being affected, according to Amazon, all European services are currently up and running.
At this point, it would appear that Amazon is not completely confident that they have identified the cause of the outages. On the dashboard, they say “…we believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.”
No time frame is provided for the repairs they are currently making.
Do you think this was a hack, virus, or just someone just tripping over a cord?
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They’ll appreciate the info when they start running across those “site not found” and related errors when accessing their favorite sites today.
• Update: at 3:52pm ET, Amazon updated their dashboard to say “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 at 4:12pm ET, Amazon reports “S3 object retrieval, listing and deletion are fully recovered now. We are still working to recover normal operations for adding new objects to S3.”
• update at 5:08pm ET, Amazon reports: “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 3/3/2017, according to Amazon, a typo caused the outage. The full explanation from Amazon is available here.