Amazon Web Services’ Four Hour Outage Took Websites Offline

Everyone is familiar with Amazon.com today, but the company has a lot of other stuff going on that many might not know about. Amazon Web Services is a massive cloud computing network that is used by some of the biggest websites online including Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest and more. A litany of smaller websites also use AWS for their daily operations.

AWS had an outage lasting about four hours on Tuesday afternoon. The outage was happened when a large portion of its S3 system going offline. Ironically the portion of AWS that went down is the portion where Amazon hosts its own service health dashboard so the dashboard to show you when things are down was down.

“This is a pretty big outage,” said Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester. “AWS had not had a lot of outages and when they happen, they’re famous. People still talk about the one in September of 2015 that lasted five hours,” he said.

The outage started at about 12:35 ET and AWS was fully functional again by 4:49 ET according to Amazon. Amazon has offered no insight to what exactly caused the portion of AWS to go down. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong says that the most common cause for such outages are software related. The particular AWS region that suffered the outage is the first of three in the US and is still the largest.