An Amazon Web Services blackout rankled the Internet on Tuesday with a four-hour outage affecting tens of thousands of websites and millions of users, a reminder of how vulnerable everyone is in the age of sharing the digital cloud.
Websites stopped loading properly while some sites even stopped loading completely, according to USA Today. Many people were unable to control Internet-connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other online conveniences.
The issue directly affected one of Amazon’s storage systems, which in turn impacted more than 40 percent of the cloud market (which is controlled by Amazon, based on revenue). Amazon's S3 system is used by more than 148,000 websites.
“A lot of people have put their stuff on Amazon, so that means when the infrastructure breaks, which doesn't happen very often, lots of things break,” said Jim Waldo, a professor and chief technology officer at Harvard, according to the Boston Herald.
Many Internet users were left in the dark on what the problem actually was because Amazon’s website showed no sign of an issue. A webpage, expected to alert users when there is a technical issue, displayed “healthy, green checkmarks” during the outage.
“In some sense, Amazon is a victim of their own success,” Waldo said. “They’ve become so successful that people have become so used to their computing services being there that it’s notable when it’s not.”
Some of the websites and services that were affected by the blackout included Quora, newsletter provider Sailthru, Business Insider, Giphy, and Slack, according to Tech Crunch.
Twitter users gave their two sense following the frustrating Amazon blackout.
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