Amazon Web Services S3 Outage is Breaking the Internet

Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 Outage broke the internet on Tuesday, leading to service that’s either partially or fully broken across multiple websites, apps, and devices. In other words, Amazon broke the internet – and not in a good way.

The AWS S3 outage “is due to high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,” according to Amazon’s AWS service health dashboard, which is where the company also says it’s working on “remediating the issue,” without revealing any additional details.

So far, affected websites and services include Buffer, Business Insider, Chef, Citrix, Codecademy, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Expedia, Expensify, Giphy, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, isitdownrightnow.com, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Medium, Microsoft’s HockeyApp, News Corp, Quora, Razer, Slack, Sprout Social, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Zendesk, among other services. Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat’s Bitmoji, and Time Inc., amongst others.

Not a good day for the public cloud. Not a good day at all.

How did this happen? Well, AWS is a public cloud, meaning that all the applications, websites, blogs, and other resources that rely on the mega-cloud to work go down, together. If one gets infected with a virus, there is a high likelihood it will be passed from site to site, file to file. I

Now, we’re not saying that is what is going on today – a server can go down for a multitude of issues – but we stand with others that say that these outages are not ok.

This, and other events like it, are why we believe in the power of private clouds. Unlike public clouds like AWS, private clouds like the Abacus Private Cloud (APC) and Cloudnine Realtime remain closed to other sites and apps. It is a monogamous relationship of sorts – one cloud for one company. APC takes your local IT infrastructure, desktop software applications, SaaS applications and data into a fully-integrated virtual workplace, accessible remotely from any device, anywhere, anytime. And what happens if another company has issues? It won’t affect you at all.

So while we wait for AWS S3 to get back online, take a moment to check out APC here. And let's hope that public clouds don't break the internet again.

By: Abacus Blogger

Abacus Blogger is the name for the hive-minded and generally outstanding marketing team at AbacusNext. You can reach the team at marketing@abacusnext.com.