Page 12 - March_Newsletter_2017

Amazon’s S3 cloud service experienced an outage on Tuesday that
caused problems for many websites and mobile apps that rely on it, in-
cluding Medium, Business Insider, Slack, Quora and Giphy.
The company said earlier on Tuesday that it was experiencing “high error
rates” on the platform affecting a large part of the east coast of the US.
Then on Tuesday afternoon, Amazon posted on its service health dash-
board that the issue had been resolved:

“As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding
new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate.
The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.”

The Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is used by tens of thousands of
web services for hosting and backing up data, including the Guardian,
which was heavily affected.
The problem had also affected some internet-connected devices, such as
as smartphone-controlled light switches.

If you are a user of NEST to control your household heating system then
you may well have noticed the problem. In order for your app to connect
to your heating system the app needs to connect via the Amazon cloud
and as we all know if it’s not a cloudy day then you have no control.
Nest also warned customers that its internet-connected security cameras
were not functioning properly – as in, weren't recording video footage for
several hours

The outage even affected a site called “is it down right now?” which mon-
itors when other sites are down.
Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video were unavailable for some us-
ers on some devices, including Alexa and internet-connected TVs.

A number of users from western Europe, including Germany and the UK,
reported issues with both services, as well as connectivity issues with their
Fire TV devices.