Amazon says it’s making progress in fixing cloud outage causing online disruptions – The Seattle Times

A lengthy outage on Amazon.coms cloud storage service, apparently stemming from the East Coast, was causing widespread disruptions in online services Tuesday morning.

Seattle Times business reporter

Amazon.com said it is making progress as it works to restore service after a lengthy outage on its cloud storage service that wrought widespread disruption in online services Tuesday.

In an alert on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) service health dashboard, posted at 12:52 p.m., the tech giants cloud computing unit said that it was seeing recovery in the operations of the data storage service affected by the outage. Users, AWS said, should expect to start seeing improved error rates within the hour.

Earlier, AWS had said that it was working hard at repairing S3, which is how the data storage service is known, and that it believed it had spotted the root cause of the problem.

The company hasnt divulged its theory as to what caused the outage, but it has pointed to the geographic origin of the issue. On its AWS status page, Amazon identified a data center location on the U.S. East Coast that was seeing high error rates in the storage service that in turn were hampering other AWS functions. The AWS status report page showed error alerts for some of the companys email, office and computing power services operating out of servers in Northern Virginia.

Reactions to the outage quickly spread on Twitter. The Harvard Business Review said its website was temporarily down due to the AWS outage.

Trello, a tool for project management, at 11:26 a.m. reported that it was still investigating the issue with AWS. That company first posted about the issue on its status page at 9:59 a.m.

The disruption underscores Amazons central role in the smooth functioning of an increasingly internet-reliant economy. While companies once had to operate facilities with private servers, nowadays many have chosen to pay Amazon and other cloud giants to store their data and even their computing processes. Cloud providers tout their server warehouses as safe and reliable.

AWS is, by far, the largest cloud provider.

Some seattletimes.com services also utilize AWS.

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Amazon says it's making progress in fixing cloud outage causing online disruptions - The Seattle Times