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Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a problem with its S3 storage service Tuesday morning that broke websites and services across the internet.
As of our first writing, the issue was still impacting many of the image and website hosting and backend services that depend on the S3 web-based service.
By 1 p.m., some of the services dependent on S3 started coming back online, and AWS posted an update that it expected to see more improvement within the hour.
Amazon’s status site had earlier reported issues — “high error rates” — with its East Coast S3 center and said the company was working to resolve the problems. Initially, even the status dashboard for AWS was not functioning correctly.
“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,” the company said in a 10:33 a.m. update.
The problems affected sites like Business Insider, Giphy, Quora, filesharing in Slack and image and video hosting at many publishing sites. Some of the Associated Press’ services to news outlets were impacted as well.
Amazon’s own Alexa service wasn’t even working correctly for at least part of the morning, according to reports.
More comedically, the site most of us use to check the status of the internet at any given time — downdetector.com — was also down.
Requests for comment were directed to Amazon’s AWS status statement.
Last October, much of the internet went down when hackers used a DDoS — distributed denial of service — attack to slow or halt access to Twitter, Amazon, Reddit and dozens of other major websites.
Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.
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