Amazon S3 outage cripples Instagram, IMDb, huge chunk of internet

Amazon S3 is a web hosting service used by many of the well-known sites on the internet. Image INQUIRER.net stock photo

The mention of Amazon immediately elicits thoughts of an online shop with various items, from books to hard-to-find collectibles.

But the company also runs a web hosting service called Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and it is currently reporting “high error rates.”

The official Twitter page had been posting updates up until 14 hours ago. Image: Twitter/@awscloud

Amazon S3 is no small service. It is used by more than 120,000 domains across the globe. Some of the sites making use of S3 are Quora, Instagram, Imgur and IMDb, reports Forbes.

Needless to say a great portion of the internet will feel the disturbance when favorite sites are suddenly offline. Fortunately, not all cases are so severe. Other sites appear to have only a few services affected, like image uploading.

The problems started earlier in the day and Amazon has managed to trace the issue coming from the US-EAST-1 region. These are the data centers in the Ashburn and Virginia area. However, it appears that services relying on S3 in other parts of the United States and other regions are not affected.

Updates on Amazon’s efforts to repair the problem are being posted on the Amazon Web Services Twitter account.

While Amazon’s engineers busy themselves in front of their computer screens, it might be a good time for some netizens to get up, stretch, and maybe brush up on rusty social skills for actual and physical human interaction, until the internet becomes whole again.

In the meantime, too, we can watch Spongebob panic. Alfred Bayle/JB

Picture of Amazon Web services right now pic.twitter.com/GTKgZ6bSru

— Noah Miller (@soe2233) February 28, 2017