A portion of Amazon Cloud Services known as “Simple Storage Services,” or S3, experienced an hours-long outage Tuesday that impacted millions of large and small companies in the United States.
The cloud-based web services provider allows companies to bypass building a server farm and access computing power without needing to spend resources on infrastructure, according to USA Today.
S3 can store videos, images, and databases remotely on its server so that client companies' websites can access data quickly and easily.
Many small and some larger companies use S3, including Pinterest, Airbnb, Netflix, and Slack.
Although an outage lasting a few hours may not seem like it would have a big impact, affected websites and systems could not do business during the outage, which could have cost them significantly.
Internet-enabled devices like home security systems, ovens, and other equipment have also reported malfunctions that are being attributed to the S3 outage, Ars Technica reported.
The outage did not affect all S3 users, but many experienced slowdowns and broken links as a result of the glitch.
Amazon says that it is “actively working on remediating the issue,” according to the Verge.
No time frame was given for a complete restoration of services, though many that were disrupted are now working again, it seems.
Ars Technica reported that the problems were coming from an Amazon data center in Virginia.
Amazon Web Services is the “major player” in cloud services, and its S3 cloud service has “three [trillion] to four trillion pieces of data stored in it,” according to Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester, as reported by USA Today.
S3 users made the best of a frustrating situation, creative venting on Twitter.
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