Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently causing some of the largest websites and services to be down. The BCloud infrastructure and services provider says it is in the midst of a problem with its popular S3 storage service.
Even we at WinBuzzer are feeling the effects of this outage. We use Trello and Slack to coordinate our work and for communication. Trello has been down for a couple of hours and has certainly disrupted our work day.
Admittedly, we are a small crew, so companies with massive infrastructure needs are being severely tested by this problem. Amazon Web Services says “We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” while there is also a status page open.
Possibly an incidental problem is users claiming they cannot download or update apps on iOS. This is so far unconfirmed as a link with the AWS problem.
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
As mentioned, the amount of services and companies affected by this outage is staggering. Here is a rundown of some of the major names left without service:
Amazon's Twitch, Atlassian's Bitbucket, Buffer, Business Insider, Chef, Citrix, Codecademy, Convo, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Expedia, Expensify, FiftyThree, Flipboard, Giphy, GitLab, Greenhouse, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, Imgur, Ionic, isitdownrightnow.com, Jamf, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Medium, Microsoft's HockeyApp, MuckRock, News Corp, Pantheon, Quora, Razer, Signal, Slack, Sprout Social, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), VSCO, and Zendesk, among other services. Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat's Bitmoji, and Time Inc. are reporting slow functionality.
That's not to mention the countless operations, like WinBuzzer, that have been indirectly affected. However, it is worth noting that Slack seems to be working fine for us, although Trello is down and out.
AWS Updates
Amazon Web Services has issued three updates since announcing the issue earlier today. At 10:30 a.m. Pacific, the company said the issue was caused by high error rates with S3 in US-East-1. This affected all services and apps dependant on S3.
The company returned 21 minutes later with another status update: “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.”
Most recently, a 11:40 a.m. Pacific, the company said it has made repairs and it can now update the service health dashboard. However, AWS continues to “experience high error rates”.
“We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue,” AWS added.
