Amazon reported its web hosting service had suffered a massive outage that has brought down a third of the internet. Amazon Simple Storage Service – has been localized to US-EAST-1 region, which points to the devil likely being in the company’s data center around Ashburn, Virginia region.
Naturally, that translates as ‘black out’ to a lot of websites, which stands at well above 120,000 that have their sites hosted on Amazon’s servers. Among the more prominent ones that have found themselves to be at the receiving end include Quora, Giphy, Instagram, IMDb, American Airlines, Imgur, and Slack. Netflix and Reddit too rely on Amazon S3 for their operations.
The companies are either reporting their entire online functionality have been hit or have been partially affected.
Those can range from the entire site failing to load to some requests not getting fulfilled. Take for instance Slack where users are still able to engage in chat conversation though they are unable to upload files to their group chats.
Interestingly, the disruptions at Amazon’s servers have also come to affect operations of several smart home devices as well, which means the lights or alarms in your home might not be working optimally. Surely not a desirable scenario though this also serves to provide a warning about too much reliance on technology does have its downside if things are not covered adequately. This serves even more for critical segments like smart home locking systems to alarms.
Amazon, of course, have stated they are actively pursuing the ‘high error rates’ but have not come up with any deadline for it to be resolved.
The company has taken to its Amazon Web Services Twitter handle for posting the latest updates. You can also have the latest information on this via the Amazon Web Services dashboard which right now is citing ‘Increased Error Rates’ to signify something serious are on to them.
