Websites and apps were down today due to an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Companies affected include Netflix, Reddit, Slack, Pinterest and probably multiple sites you tried visiting today! Even Amazon themselves were unable to report the problem to themselves properly.
An AWS conference was on, as well, showing off the new S3 dashboard and it failed mid-presentation!
The moment the presenter realizes S3 is down. #AWS #S3 #Amazon pic.twitter.com/S8gY1J9lrH
— Ian Sherwood (@ian_surewould) February 28, 2017
Services started to come back online around 4:15pm EST, the outage apparently coming from a location in North Virginia.
As cloud services are controlled by fewer and fewer large-scale providers, these problems won’t go away. It takes one line of code to throw entire cities off the grid for a little while. Backup & disaster recovery is a key player in the safety of your information. Especially if you have a business!
