Some of the world's most popular apps and websites went dark on Tuesday after Amazon's cloud service had a big disruption
On its status page on Tuesday, Amazon places the blame with its S3 storage service, which it says is seeing "high error rates" for websites and apps hosted from its flagship US East data center, based in Virginia.
Among the sites and services that appear to be affected are Slack, Quora, Lonely Planet, Snapchat's Bitmoji and even the US Securities and Exchange Commission website (let's hope Snapchat parent company Snap doesn't file an update to its IPO prospectus).
Amazon S3 is a very common service that websites use to store files, and the US East data center is one of its biggest facilities, meaning that this is wreaking havoc all over the web. Sites like Imgur use S3 to store their photo files, for instance, making those sites slow to load, if they load at all.
Notably, this isn't technically an "outage," since Amazon's S3 is not entirely out of commission and some services are only partially affected.
"We are actively working on remediating the issue," Amazon says on its service page. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment. And in an ironic twist, Amazon Web Services tweeted that the "dashboard" that allows users to see the status of its own services was not able to update itself because of the S3 technical problem.
Given Amazon's massive reach, cut your favorite websites a little slack if they're acting funny today - it might not be their fault.