On Tuesday, thousands of websites and apps experienced downtime as a result of an outage on Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service. The very popular cloud storage service began reporting problems with instances hosted in its Northern Virginia data center around 11:45 a.m. PT on Tuesday. As of 2:08 p.m. PT, AWS said, “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.”
Websites affected by the problem with the cloud computing service included Quora, Imgur, IFTTT, Adobe, Giphy, Slack and, somewhat ironically, Is it down right now? and Down Detector, both of which are used to check for outages.
“This is significant because S3 is such a core service to AWS,” said Dave Bartoletti, Forrester’s public cloud expert. “Virtually everyone who uses AWS uses S3.”