Many of you might have faced problem accessing a website or internet services a couple of days back. The outage was found to be due to the Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which experienced ‘high error rates’. Websites which depended on Amazon Web Services (AWS), this includes most of the popular websites like Quora, Sailthru, Business Insider, Giphy, etc. experienced a lot of issues. It is said that the issue even broke Amazon’s ability to report the problem. The outage also impacted the IoT hardware, including connected lightbulbs, thermostat, etc.
According to SimilarTech, there are around 148,213 websites and 121,761 unique domains that are using Amazon S3. Though this is just 0.8% of top 1 million websites using Amazon’s S3 services; however, the impact was huge.
So far Amazon hasn’t provided details on the exact reason for the outage; however, it was said that the issue was due to a typo while trying to remove a few servers from S3, as it resulted in removing more than requires servers from S3. It included the two crucial servers meant for finding and adding new files. This made Amazon to re-start the servers, which was very unusual and took more than expected time. Amazon initially outlined the geographies that got impacted by this outage. However, the impact was more wide and serious. Financial Services Companies were the most to get affected with the loss of around $160.
This is not the first time websites were inaccessible due to the outage and gives us a plenty of reasons to worry upon. Some of them are mentioned below.
- Over dependency on handful of services to drive the Internet
- AWS and other similar providers have made the companies to avail cloud services, increasing the chance of failure impact on a large number of users
- Undiversified online data source
According to the latest update from Amazon, AWS has been fully recovered by resolving the error rate issues, as S3 service is operating normally. This resolution was a result of a series of steps taken by Amazon in a span of 90 minutes.
