What Happened To Amazon’s AWS’S3 Cloud Service For 5 Hours

Thousands of websites and apps were recently hit by the five-hour Amazon outage. Mashable, Verge and other publishers were unable to publish content or post images during the period. The users of Nest smart thermostats too failed on the day to connect via an app. The list of sufferings is long and includes companies like IFTTT, Lonely Planet, Medium, Kickstarter, Muck Rock, News Corp, Quora, Vermont, Airbnb, Pinterest, Snapchat’s Bitmoji and VSCO.

The outrage was centered in AWS’S3 storage system, which is largest service of Amazon and used for cloud storage, on the east coast. If believed to experts, the virtual hard drive of the tech giant has about three to four trillion pieces of data stored.

Some of the users reported entire sites went down while many complained of broken links. Most of the site or app browsers encountered the problem for about 3.5 hours, but for others the suffering was longer.

Amazon has come up with a statement saying incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of its billing system was the cause of the outage. It was therefore forced to issue an embarrassing apology mentioning a full restart was required and it took longer time than expected.

The Seattle company said changes are now being made to the system to ensure such incorrect commands does not trigger outage again in future.

The world’s largest provider of cloud services wrote, “While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses. .. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”

Web firm similratech said the Amazon outage affected nearly 150,000 sites.

Twitter was flooded with outage tweets and users started asking, “Where has the cloud gone?”

The services were restored around 4 p.m. EST and about one hour later the company noted the S3 was fully recovered and was operating normally.

Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster called the outage as “a temporary black eye” for Amazon.

S3 is Simple Storage Service. It stores files and data for other firms on remote servers.

The last outage was of Amazon’s DynamoDB service in 2015. It is a cloud-based database and affected several companies including Medium and Netflix.

Isn’t the recent outage prompts many internet users to store data in more than one location of Amazon cloud? Share your views.