Amazon Web Services’ S3 hosting service appears to be causing a widespread internet outage, and people are losing it on Twitter.
We first got word of the error from Drew Prindle, the emerging technologies editor at Digital Trends.
A number of people trying to access a range of websites are receiving a 500 error code.
The outage is impacting a number of popular sites including the Harvard Business Review, Canva, and Razer. Amazon claims its S3 servers are “designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability.”
The online retailer and cloud-hosting giant released an update on its health dashboard:
Increased Error Rates
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.
We have reached out to Amazon Web Services and will update this article as we learn more.
Update 1:20pm CT, Feb. 28: According to Amazon’s status website, the issue is ongoing.
“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.”
Update 1:52pm CT, Feb. 28: Amazon repaired its health dashboard, so that it now shows which services are failing. The company thinks it knows the root cause of the issue, and is working to implement a solution.
Update 3:03pm CT, Feb. 28: Amazon says it’s seeing signs that the S3 is recovering. It will continue to work on a fix and excepts to start seeing improved error rates within the hour.
Update 4:20pm CT, Feb. 28: Amazon has fully recovered all S3 operations. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally—and our national nightmare is over.