Amazon has gone and done it. The company has managed to break the internet. And not in that stupid Kim K “Look at my gross butt” sort of way, but in the actual way where you can’t use it correctly. Let me explain.
Just shortly after 1pm on Tuesday, a number of web services ceased to function correctly, or at all, after a widespread outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This outage translated to hits on tons of websites, including Down Detector. That right, people. The site that check if sites are down, went down.
What’s strange is that at the time of this writing Amazon doesn’t know what is causing the issue, only noting that AWS is dealing with “increased error rates” with the service. In an official statement, Amazon said:
We’ve identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue.
That may sound like a lot of Star Trek talk, but the S3 that the company mentions above is the Simple Storage Service, the very service that helps to keep websites online and running. So you can imagine that an issue there would have some serious ramifications.
So serious in fact, that there are an untold number of major sites that depend on Amazon’s cloud storage service that an outage there could essentially cripple the internet across the whole of the United States.
No word yet on the cause or if hackers are behind today’s issues, but a great many people and IT techs are having a really shitty day because of it.
About Author
