An outage of one of Amazon Web Services’ main storage systems on the east coast disrupted thousands of websites and apps, including some based here in the Centre Region.
Around noon on Wednesday, parts of the S3 system, one of the most commonly used cloud services, went offline. By 5 p.m. AWS said it had restored all operations.
The outage didn’t cause entire websites to go down, but made parts of them unavailable. Businesses frequently use S3 to host, among other things, photos and video files, and in many cases media would not load. Some sites were unable to upload new content or make edits to existing content.
‘The effects of the outage will vary depending on the site and how it uses AWS,’ USA Today explained. ‘Modern websites usually pull data from multiple databases in the cloud which can be stored all over the world, so a photo might come from one place, a price list from another and a customer database from a third.
‘For that reason, entire websites rarely go down but various part of them may take a long time to load or not load at all, leaving broken links or images.’
StateCollege.com was one of the websites affected by the outage, experiencing slow load times and broken images. Penn State reported service outages throughout the afternoon with Canvas, its learning management system that lets students and faculty manage and access online course content, such as uploading assignments and grades.
Sites such as espn.com, Quora, SoundCloud, Giphy and Slack are just some that use the S3 service, Bloomberg reported.
AWS said the issue came from “high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,’ which USA Today reported is S3’s largest regional storage system.
At 5:08 p.m. AWS reported in its Server Health Dashboard that ‘The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.’
A five-hour outage in 2015 at the same data center disrupted a number of popular sites and apps such as Netflix, Tinder and Reddit.
