Last night Amazon’s AWS experienced a 4-hour outage due to a big portion of their S3 system going down. AWS Twitter profile was filled with complaints by users affected by the issue. The Amazon outage lasted approximately 4-5 hours and continues to cause errors on some applications.

Unfortunately, the dashboard reflecting AWS health is also hosted on Amazon’s S3 and therefore not able to display the correct status of the service.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) powers a huge percentage of sites and organizations on the internet like Expedia, Coursera, Quora, Trello, Slack, Business Insider, Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Giphy.  Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud storage, which allows the management and distribution of an enormous amount of data online.

Not all users were fully affected by the outage –  some services, like Slack and Alexa for instance, were just partially impaired.

Ironically, Isitdownrightnow.com – a website, which shows the status of sites online, hosted on AWS, was also down. For a correct status on websites, feel free to use my own tool, which has never been down so far.

Another company deeply affected by the outage was WP Engine – a managed WordPress provider. If you are a customer of theirs but the downtime has made you wish to switch providers, read my article on the alternatives to WP Engine.