Some of the world's most popular apps and websites went dark Tuesday after Amazon's cloud service had a big disruption (AMZN)

pulse

February 28, 2017 9:17 PM

An Amazon S3 outage is wreaking havoc across the internet.

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Amazon Web Services, the remote data centers that power some of the world's most popular websites, experienced a major disruption lasting several hours on Tuesday that left numerous apps and websites — including Business Insider — difficult to access for many users.

On its status page on Tuesday, Amazon placed the blame with its S3 storage service, which it said was seeing "high error rates" for websites and apps hosted from its flagship US East (Northern Virginia) Region data center.

Among the sites and services that appeared to be affected were Slack, Quora, Lonely Planet, Snapchat's Bitmoji, and even the US Securities and Exchange Commission website. (Let's hope Snapchat parent company Snap doesn't file an update to its IPO prospectus.)

Amazon S3 is a very common service that sites use to store files, and the US East data center is one of its biggest facilities, meaning that this is wreaking havoc all over the web. Sites like Imgur use S3 to store their photo files, for instance, making those sites slow to load, if they load at all.

Shortly before 2 p.m. PST on Tuesday, Amazon said the situation had been resolved:

"As of 1:49 PM PST, 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," Amazon said on its status page.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company had no comment beyond the status update, and declined to provide any information about what caused the problem or how widespread the issue was.

Notably, this wasn't technically an "outage," since Amazon's S3 wasn't not entirely out of commission and some services were only partially affected.

In an ironic twist that underscored the chaos triggered by the situation, Amazon Web Services tweeted at one point that the "dashboard" that allows users to see the status of its own services was not able to update itself because of the S3 technical problem.

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