Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service experienced widespread issues on the 28th of February, crippling or breaking dependent websites, apps and devices. Cited as “High error rates with S3”, the event lasted about five hours. S3 refers to the company’s Simple Storage Service which is behind countless websites and services like Slack, Quora, and Trello.
According to Amazon, the outage was caused by a failure in AWS’ Northern Virginia facility - AWS’ oldest server farm.
On the day of the outage, it was reported that AWS up-time was ~99.59% - still under their 99.95% target but it clearly shows that Amazon run a tight ship. This is perhaps a useful reminder for business and IT that move data to cloud services, either as a financial decision or to remain competitive by offering customers cloud services.
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