AWS Takes Down Hundreds of Sites in Massive S3 Outage

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Availability issues with the US-EAST-1 region of AWS' S3 storage service caused downtime or slow performance for many websites on Tuesday.

Affected sites include Airbnb, Business Insider, Chef, Docker, Expedia, Heroku, Mailchimp, News Corp, Pantheon, Pinterest, Slack, and Trello, as well as parts of AWS' own site, and ironically itsdownrigthnow.com and Down Detector, VentureBeat reports.

AWS acknowledged the issues before 7:30 a.m. Pacific, saying it was investigating. Shortly after 10:30 a.m. Pacific, the company updated the statement on its status page.

“We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3,” AWS service health dashboard said.

An hour later, AWS updated the message: “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.”

AWS suffered a service disruption lasting over five hours in 2015. Google App Engine was down for nearly 2 hours in August, and problems at Telia Carrier affected many popular sites and services in June of last year.