SAN FRANCISCO — Portions of Amazon Web Services, the nation's largest cloud computing company, went offline Tuesday afternoon, affecting millions of companies across the United States .
AWS provides cloud-based storage and web services for companies so that they don’t have to build their own server farms, allowing them to rapidly deploy computing power without having to invest in infrastructure. For example, a business might store its video or images or databases on an AWS server and access it via the Internet.
Companies that use AWS include Pinterest, Airbnb, Netflix, Slack, Buzzfeed, Spotify and some Gannett systems. While not all were affected by the outage, some experienced slowdowns.
AWS began as a profitable sideline to Amazon’s main online sales business but has since grown to become the major player in the arena as well as a major money-maker in its own right for Amazon. In the fourth quarter of 2016 the division accounted for 8% of Amazon’s total revenue.
"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.
The outage appeared to have begun around 12:35 pm ET, according to Catchpoint Systems, a digital experience monitoring company. It was centered in AWS' S3 storage system on the east coast.
S3 is Amazon's largest cloud service, used by more than half of its million plus customers, Bartoletti said. "It's got north of three to four trillion pieces of data stored in it," he said.
AWS S3 is used by businesses both large and small.
One affected company was 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 will vary depending on the site and how it uses 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.'
On Amazon's AWS site, the company notes that it had identified "high error rates" but said it was "working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."
The company actually wasn't able to update its own service health dashboard for the first two hours of the outage because the dashboard was hosted on AWS.
Short outages happen from time to time but long ones get everyone's attention. If the outage continues into the three-hour mark "we'll start seeing people flip out," Bartoletti said.
