The nation's largest cloud computing company, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is having a system failure. Portions of the service went offline on Tuesday, Feb. 28, affecting apps, websites, and millions of companies across the U.S, especially on the East Coast.
Amazon's Cloud Service Outage
According to Computerworld, on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 2:35 p.m. ET, AWS reported on its Service Health Dashboard that its engineers were working to fix the outage that has affected major websites including Adobe, Reddit, Mashable, and Netflix. The Associated Press also reported that the outage has affected its own web feeds, photos, and other online services. Meanwhile, those sites appear to be back online.
According to USA Today, Catchpoint Systems, a digital experience monitoring company, reported that the outage appeared to have begun around 12:35 pm ET. The issue was centered on the East Coast, in AWS' S3 storage system. The US-EAST-1 region is where AWS rolls out new features. That system is still the largest, being estimated that Amazon S3 is used by 148,213 websites.
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers web service interfaces based storage. The US-EAST-1 covers a region of data centers located in northern Virginia. AWS provides web services and cloud-based storage for companies so that they don't have to build their own server farms. Thanks to AWS, companies do not have to invest in infrastructure in order to rapidly deploy computing power. For instance, an enterprise might store its databases or images or video on an AWS server that can be accessed via the Internet.
Companies That Use AWS
Among companies that use AWS include Netflix, Spotify, Slack, Airbnb, Pinterest, Buzzfeed and some Gannett systems. Not all of them were affected by the outage, but many have experienced slowdowns. Some websites were down and on other sites, users may have noticed issues in uploading files.
Effects Of AWS Outage Vary Depending On Site
The effects of the Amazon's cloud service outage vary from site to site, based on how it uses AWS. Modern websites are usually using data from multiple databases located in the cloud. These various databases can be stored all over the world, so a customer database might come from one place, a photo from another and a photo from a third. Entire websites rarely go down for that reason, but various parts of them may not load at all or take a long time to load.
