Amazon scrambles to fix Web Services outage

The problem affected tons of sites online, from publications such as Business Insider to platforms including Flipboard, Slack and Medium. Even the SEC was affected.

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The average consumer might not be aware of Amazon’s cloud offering, its S3 tool provides the storage backbone for many websites’ images, video and databases.

Though outages like this are rare, their broad reach is significant due to the high volume of websites that rely on AWS. The websites affected in yesterday’s outage included Business Insider, Medium, Netflix, IFTTT, Slack, MailChimp, Airbnb, The Verge, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision, Flipboard and more.

The first news from the company came via tweet:

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

A message posted to the AWS Service Health Dashboard stated:

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.

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