Amazon S3 Down For Over Three Hours… and Counting!

Amazon’s S3 storage service appears to be down. CenterNetworks images are broken because of it and I had to move the style sheet back so the site at least renders correctly. Sites like Twitter have massive broken images currently because Amazon S3 is down.

We will keep updating this post until the service has recovered. As of Noon Eastern time, the S3 service is down.

Amazon’s S3 service was also down this past February and Amazon explained the reasons for the outage and downtime a few days later. There has to be a way to failover when S3 is down.

As always report in if you are having issues with Amazon S3.

Update: Amazon S3 clients are now posting outage messages on the forums. It appears EC2 is working ok.

Update 2: Amazon is now reporting on their health dashboard that Amazon S3 has "elevated error rates".

Update 3 – 12:55pm: Now down over an hour, Amazon says they are "pursuing several paths of corrective action. Sites affected include SmugMug and Twitter. Twitter is up with no images while SmugMug had to take the service down since so much of it relies on Amazon’s services.

Update 4 – 1:55pm: Amazon now reporting, "10:33 AM PDT A quick update that we believe this is an issue with the communication between several Amazon S3 internal components. We do not have an ETA at this time but will continue to keep you updated."

Update 5 – 3:45pm: We are now down over 3.5 hours – Amazon’s latest update, "12:25 PM PDT We have restored communication between additional hosts and are continuing this work across the rest of the fleet. Thank you for your continued patience."

One Response

  • Nick

    Business owners should really start to look for alternatives, Amazon doesnt seem to stable enough especially for smaller companies that rely on them for primary storage. I encourage others to check out Nirvanix, they even offer a migration tool for S3 users to move over the Nirvanix system, check them out:
    http://developer.nirvanix.com/files/folders/applications/entry886.aspx