Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service went down today and caused several issues throughout the web. Many web services that rely on the S3 including Medium, News Corp, Quora, SendGrid, Slack, Trello, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Zendesk went down. SoundCloud, Airbnb, Down Detector, Pinterest, Snapchat’s Bitmoji and Time Inc. were last reported to be working slowly.
Amazon’s web service hosts websites, provides hosting for images for many websites, and app backends. The problem originated in the Simple Storage Service known as S3 which serves as the foundation for many cloud-based products.
AWS stated “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.”
SoundCloud, which is listed as a “case study“, has been keeping users updated on the issues regarding their website on Twitter.
We’re experiencing degraded services such as playback and upload due to a vendor outage. Updates can be found here: https://t.co/H8R8Lozkp7
— SoundCloud Support (@SCsupport) February 28, 2017
SoundCloud issues included problems with playback and uploads, resulting in chaos for many producers and teams. The impact of the crash has even affected connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware leaving them uncontrollable.
Amazon made improvements to the service later this afternoon saying, “As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.”
AWS previously had an outage in 2015 for five hours.