Lights Out for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) all of Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Outage Shutters Twitter and Thousands of Other Websites
Written by henshaw | Posted on February 15th, 2008
Update 1: It’s being reported that all of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is down.
Update 2: AWS appears to be back online as of 9:00AM CST. The outage lasted about 1-2 hours this morning.
Friday morning (February 15, 2008) Amazon Web Services experienced a system-wide outage of their Simple Storage Service (S3). This outage has affected thousands of websites and Web applications, including Twitter and Raven SEO Tools. Twitter relies on S3 to display their images. However, if you visited it this morning, instead of seeing avatars, you only saw text.
If you’re a user of Raven, and you were trying to view your SERP Tracker data, the only thing you would have seen is the “no data” message. That’s because we use S3 to store our SERP Tracker data.
This is the first major outage that Amazon S3 has experienced (that I’m aware of). It’s a little disconcerting, especially since so many websites now rely on it to function properly. I can only hope that this outage ends up being a rare and atypical occurrence.