Massive Amazon cloud service outage disrupts sites








“This is a pretty big outage,” said Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester. “AWS had not had a lot of outages and when they happen, they’re famous. People still talk about the one in September of 2015 that lasted five hours,” he said.


AWS S3 is used by businesses both large and small.  “More than anything else, S3 customer need to be able to get at their data, because often S3 is used to store images. So no S3, no nice picture or fancy logo on your website,” said Leong.

That was exactly the problem faced by Lewis Bamboo, a small, family-owned bamboo nursery in Oakman, Alabama.

“As our business is in bamboo plants, pictures are a very important part of selling our product online. We use Amazon S3 to store and distribute our website images. When Amazon’s servers went down, so did the majority of our website,” said the company’s chief technology officer Daniel Mullaly.

“Thankfully we also store the images locally and I was able to serve the images directly from our server instead,” he said.

The effects of the outage  varied depending on the site and how it used AWS. Modern websites usually pull data from multiple databases in the cloud which can be stored all over the world, so a photo might come from one place, a price list from another and a customer database from a third.

For that reason, entire websites rarely go down but various part of them may take a long time to load or not load at all, leaving broken links or images.

Companies have been steadily moving storage to the cloud because it is cheaper, easily accessible and more resilient. But the downside is that when there are problems, there’s a cascade effect.

“There are lots of people having a not very good day at the moment,” said Leong.

It’s possible to contract with multiple companies to avoid potential problems but it’s pricey, so many companies make peace with the knowledge that on rare occasions they’re going to have that very bad day.
