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Amazon AWS Outage Affects Hundreds of Thousands of Websites

Hundreds of thousands of websites experienced data issues after an Amazon Web Service data center experienced a four-hour outage on February 28.

Hundreds of thousands of websites went down for during the afternoon on February 28 after Amazon experienced an outage in one of its regional data centers that numerous US websites depend on for web services and cloud-based storage.

In a statement, released more than three hours into the service’s outage, Amazon said that they were, as of 4PM ET, still experiencing “high error rates” on their Simple Storage Service (S3) but reassured clients that a solution had been found and was awaiting implementation.

Amazon is the largest provider of cloud computing services in the USA, and stores data for thousands of websites and media outlets including Slack, Splitwise, Medium, Trello, Netflix, Spotify, Buzzfeed, and Pinterest.

While the system outage didn’t take its toll on all of Amazon Web Service (AWS)’s clients, most of them reported slowdowns in some segments of their service spectrum, while a number of smaller sites went almost completely unavailable.

File uploading and downloading was particularly an across-the-board hiccup given the fact that even the bigger businesses and websites depend on the AWS for cheaper and more secure storage of large documents, videos, and images.

Tech company The Verge, through its editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, took to Twitter to alert their users on the Amazon outage following an article being published without an accompanying image.

Messaging startup Slack Technologies also acknowledged on the same social platform that its users may have experienced difficulty uploading files among other issues, but didn’t directly cite the AWS outage as the reason for the anomaly.

Other prominent users of AWS impacted by the outage include Apple Inc., whose high-traffic music streaming service and app store products went down with the outage, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Apart from government departments and businesses, the outage reached unlikely institutions and brought crucial activities to a standstill.

A Georgetown University website, where lecturers record and manage course data, assignments and grades, experienced connectivity problems on a typically busy Tuesday morning, paralyzing academic activities in the campus, read a statement from the university’s Chief Information Officer to students and professors according to Reuters.

Amazon itself was also allegedly not able to update its service health dashboard for the first half of the outage because the service is hosted on AWS.

aws was down for 4 hours

According to Catchpoint Systems, a digital monitoring company, the outage begun at approximately 12:35 pm ET and got fixed at 4:49 pm ET – a four-hour outage.

The cause of the outage remains undisclosed so far with Amazon choosing to remain mum, but experts claim the range of possible causes for such issues is short and that identifying the real cause cannot be used to substantiate Amazon’s silence.

According to cloud analyst Dave Bartoletti, “this is a pretty big outage” which he believes is going to take years to forget just like its 2015 predecessor.

“AWS has not had many outages but when they happen, they are famous,” he said.

“People still talk about the one in 2015 that lasted 5 hours.”

Gartner cloud analyst Lydia Leong reckons the server outage was most likely down to a software hitch.

“Either a bug in the code or human error,” she said.

“Right now we can’t tell exactly what it was.”

The system that experienced the outage, she explains, makes for a third of all AWS regions in the US, further underscoring the enormity of the service’s outage.

Amazon Web Services comes as one of the best performing product of the popular online shopping site.

It started as an Amazon sideline, but has slowly grown to become the largest web hosting company in the US with approximately 148,200 websites.

S3 is used mostly for storing images, although it is not restricted to any specific type of data.

Most of the websites that managed to still publish posts with images during the server outage were those that actually store a copy of the data locally.

One such website was Alabama-based bamboo nursery, whose Chief Technology Officer Daniel Mullay believed could not operate without images.

For that reason, he explains, the company has a locally stored gallery, which served its purpose when Amazon’s S3 experienced the outage.

Luckily for the websites and businesses that were not braced, Amazon was quick on the draw to shun breaking their own negative record of September 2015.

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