Amazon Web Services Failure Literally ‘Broke the Internet’

If you’ve been having trouble browsing the web today, you’re not alone. You’ve probably encountered several Facebook or Twitter posts with friends and followers asking “is anyone else having trouble with [insert website here]?” Or perhaps you’ve received a call from your grandmother or elderly uncle complaining that “the internet is broken.”

Certain internet memes or news stories wash over the internet so quickly and heavily, that they have been said to “break the internet.” A massive Amazon Web Services outage today has, in some ways, literally done just that – “broken the internet.”

Amazon Web Services is the nation’s largest cloud computing company, providing cloud based storage and services for many of the most popular sites on the web. Millions were inconvenienced at work today when they had trouble accessing sites such as Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and Slack. Amazon Web Services provides services for Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Spotify, Reddit, and Netflix, as well – although no major issues were reported with these sites, home users may have noticed some trouble with them at some point during the day. Somewhat ironically, isitdownrightnow.com, a website that helps users discover if a website they are trying to access is down (or if there is a problem on the user’s end), has been inaccessible for a good portion of the day.

Many Alexa devices were affected, and even Nest thermostat owners may have run into trouble today, as there were reports that many Nest devices were unable to connect to their thermostats for a time.

According to TheVerge, “Amazon has suffered brief outages before that have knocked offline services including Instagram, Vine, and IMDB.” It is the most widespread and longest lasting issue that Amazon Web Services has encountered yet.

Amazon has acknowledged the issue, reporting “high error rates” on the Amazon Web Services dashboard. According to USAToday, the outage appeared to have begun around 12:35pm ET, and is centered in Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage system on the East Coast, Amazon’s largest cloud storage service. Many websites that rely on the S3 storage system failed to load completely, while others had missing images and videos.

At the moment, it’s unclear as to when all of AWS’s services will be restored. On its services tracking page, Amazon has said that they are “actively working on remediating the issue.”