Amazon AWS Outage Means The Internet Is Down

If you've had some trouble accessing certain (read: many) services and websites today, you're not alone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing problems with its us-east-1 region of data centers, and that is causing some major outages and headaches for companies relying on the service. Major websites and online services are being affected, including ones like Quora, Trello and more.

The issue is affecting Amazon's S3 storage service in particular, and according to the company it has to do with "high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3." A quick look at the AWS status page shows that problems remain ongoing, with Amazon's latest update reading:

Update at 10:33 AM PST: We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3.

This isn't the first time Amazon Web Services has experienced a degree of outages, and it's not likely to be the last time. The cause of the issue is unknown (or, at least, unstated) at this time. The extent of sites and services affected by this issue is unclear. If you experience trouble accessing certain websites or services, this may be the cause.