Amazon Web Services S3 Break down & Its Impact on the Internet World

Hi everyone! Today I’ll start my article with a question i.e., did you experience a break down in the internet service yesterday? It wasn’t your ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) issue, it was an issue all over the world. Yes! AWS server was down. Will jump in to its details before gaining some facts and basics of the company and the web service provider.

Amazon, the world’s largest Ecommerce marketplace after AliExpress is one of the most advanced and best ecommerce portal. The very first organization in the field of ecommerce, to make use of recommender systems and implementing artificial intelligence, in order to improve the user experience. Very few are aware that amazon is also a cloud company. Yes, amazon provides its cloud based servers to many websites which you see on the internet. Started in the year 1994, with only bookselling, and then diversified into DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video download/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewellery. In 2015, Amazon went ahead of Walmart and as of 2016, is the fourth most valuable Public Company.

Okay friends, as we now know, what Amazon is? Let’s move ahead with our main discussion, The Amazon Web Services, Its Break down and its impact on the internet, two days ago. Amazon besides being the top contender in the Ecommerce Market, also provides cloud-computing as their service. Amazon offers cloud-computing services that makes up an on-demand computing platform. They include two main types:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Provides more than 70 services ranging from compute, storage, networking, database, analytics and many more. So basically by providing such services, Amazon not only sells products on the ecommerce website, but also happens to run the internet, by providing their cloud web services.

Not the entire, but a significant of it is provided by Amazon. Amazon S3 is used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains, according to data tracked by SimilarTech, and its popularity as a content host concentrates specifically in the U.S. It’s used by 0.8 percent of the top 1 million websites.

Amazon’s S3 web-based storage service was experiencing widespread issues, leading to service that was either partially or fully broken on websites, apps and devices upon which it relies. The AWS offering provides hosting for images for a lot of sites, and also hosts entire websites, and app back-ends including Nest.

The issue as shown in the AWS Dashboard and confirmed by AWS that it was “identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which was also impacting applications and services dependent on S3.” S3 is AWS’s scalable cloud storage service (as mentioned above). Amazon AWS still needs to find out the technical glitch behind the shutting down of S3.

Initially the bug was identified at an event, where a presenter was demonstrating the system on the AWS, when he realized that the system has shut down, due to some internal errors. The output window, which made amazon aware of the S3 break down was:

Major sites like, Quora, Slack, Coursera, IFTTT, Business Insider and many others were affected and remained temporarily down, as Amazon’s AWS was dealing with errors itself. Due to this, many tasks were not functioning properly. Many websites consist image tool uploaded on the AWS and so for them, it was such a scenario, that the post was uploaded but without an image (as image was not fetched from the server). So the major websites in the internet world were on a standstill due to the breakdown of AWS S3. It was really a breaking news among the internet users and throughout the world, as AWS assures 99.9999999999% uptime, i.e. approximately 1 fail in 100,000,000 websites.

Though after a few hours of bug fixing and resolving the issue, the AWS S3 reported fully recovery and everything went on to proper place. Major Websites which were affected by this break down, were accessible and were there after functioning smoothly.