Amazon’s AWS Cloud Service Experiences Outage Affecting Over a Hundred Thousand Websites Dylan Duarte February 28, 2017 News Amazon is good for a lot of things besides just jamming a Dash button when you need more toilet paper. They also provide cloud storage to websites that don’t want to/can’t build their own server farms, and when a portion of their Amazon Web Service cloud went down earlier today, it affected 148,213 websites. So like, you know, a lot. The outage began around 9:35 am PST and was centered in Amazon Web Services’ Amazon S3 storage system on the east coast. Amazon has three AWS systems, and the S3 was their first and still the largest, which is where they roll out all of their new features. Much of the functionality was restored by 1:00 pm PST, but not all of it. Among the companies affected were Pinterest, Netflix, Buzzfeed, Spotify, and Airbnb, even if the effect was just minor slowdown. The effect of the outage depends on exactly how the company uses AWS. AWS doesn’t experience a lot of outages, but when they do, they certainly cause a lot of problems. Share This With The World!