If you’re having trouble accessing several parts of the Web
today, it’s because Amazon Web Services is having a bit of a glitch this
morning.
A server issue in Virginia is affecting most of the northeast, killing
the infrastructure for many popular products and services
including Netflix, Product Hunt, Medium, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe,
Pocket, Viber Amazon Echo and more. The outage occurred around 6 AM ET.
At The Next Web, we use SocialFlow as our tool to send out tweets
with shortened URL and our other scheduled social media posts. As many
users have noted, clicking the links on our Twitter stream or Facebook
Timeline today leads to a 503 error page.
It’s certainly not the first time AWS has taken much of the Internet
down with it. In 2013, AWS suffered a similar outage that took services
like Instagram, Airbnb and Vine offline. According to Buzzfeed , that’s a loss of about $1,100 per second for Amazon.
Amazon Web Services’ Twitter account has yet to acknowledge the issue, but you can keep track of the health status at its dashboard here. In the meantime… I guess it’s time to go outside?
Update 11:53 AM ET: Most services seem to be returning to normal, but you should probably stay outside and get in that supple of O2.
