In addition to selling you DVDs and pants and five-pound bags of gummy bears, Amazon also happens to run the internet. Not the whole internet, mind you, but a significant portion, thanks to its web-hosting service (on which a number of the websites that make up the internet we know and feel ambivalent about today reside). Today, a pillar of that service, a storage option known as Amazon S3, went down … and a lot of the web went with it.
The outage means that certain sites have not been able to deliver specific assets of a webpage, or an entire webpage altogether, as a result of the interruption. If your favorite site isn’t loading at the moment, or it’s acting sluggish, that’s probably why.
Even Amazon employees themselves can’t get in. At a demonstration to developers in Chicago this afternoon, a speaker reportedly spoke of the service’s steadfast reliability right before getting shut out of the system.
As the great poets once said, “Whoooooooops!”
According to AWS’s Twitter account, they’re working on solving the problems — one of which is that the server on which the error-alert system is hosted, is also failing.
