Updated: Amazon S3 Outage Rips Through Enterprise

Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service is having severe issues and it’s affecting websites and apps across the enterprise.

The service is reportedly partially or fully broken on various devices, as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) tool provides hosting for images, backends of apps and even entire sites.

This particular outage was caused by “high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1,” according to Amazon’s AWS service health dashboard. The tech giant also confirmed there that they are working on fixing the problem.

Sites that are seeing issues because of this include Business Insider, Quora, Giphy, filesharing in Slack, and many others, TechCrunch reported. IoT hardware is also affected and many have lost control of their devices.

About 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains use Amazon S3, according to TechCrunch.

“Amazingly, even the status indicators on the AWS service status page rely on S3 for storage of its health marker graphics, hence why the site is still showing all services green despite obvious evidence to the contrary,” the site said.

AWS took to their Twitter account to provide updates on the situation:

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

And just before 3 p.m., they tweeted that the dashboard has recovered and users will “see updates for individual services shortly.”

UPDATE* 3/3/17

In a statement posted Thursday, Amazon said the issue may have stemmed from an employee mistake. A worker was reportedly doing maintnenance on Amazon Web Services Tuesday and reportedly typed in the wrong codes. A few typos caused quite a few errors.

Think that person still has their job?

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