Amazon’s AWS S3 service is having some technical issues that are causing major websites and services throughout the internet to have errors, or to be completely unusable. According to the latest update from Amazon they are “continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3”  and that “AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates”. The issues seem are connected with Amazon’s “US-EAST-1” data center, located in Northern Virginia. Amazon has not yet stated what may have caused the issues.

In addition to  major websites, the outage is affecting services such as IFTT, as well as home automaton products, including Samsung Smart Things and Nest. So this outage certainly is not good for those who use these services to protect or control their homes.  Amazon has had outages in that past and every time it affects large parts of the internet, but this is an unfortunate consequence we accept as a trade-off for all the progress “the cloud” has helped us to achieve. In a bit of irony this outage has also brought down my favorite website for checking on outages, Down Detector, this is the tweet they posted about the matter.

 

Update: At 2:08 PM Amazon posted that the S3 service has been fixed and is now operating normally.