On Tuesday, February 28, 2017, many people were complaining why some of their favorite sites are not working or loading. Many sites from Quora, to Canvas, to Slack were all down for around three to four hours. The reason?
Well the reason is because all these sites use Amazon Web Services to host their websites online. The issue was with AWS, not these websites. Because so many businesses and websites use AWS for their online needs, Amazon has the potential to break or build a site and/or their company. Amazon said their S3 services were down and they were working hard on trying to fix the problem. According to SimilarTech, there were 148,213 sites that went down. AWS said,
We’ve identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue.
Amazon also tweeted out many tweets updating users and customers about their services. Good thing is that most sites are back online now and functioning again.
If you have any questions or concerns for sites that are still down, you can contact the website and/or AWS.
