Issue with Amazon servers causing worldwide internet outages

In a statement, Amazon said as of 4 p.m. EST it was still experiencing errors that were “impacting various AWS services”.

Amazon’s hosting outages have been pretty rare, but when they hit, they’re wide and noticeable.

Today’s outage serves a reminder that while the cloud can provide great security, performance, financial, and convenience benefits, it also introduces a significant vulnerability-a failure at a single provider can cause major headaches for numerous parties. In 2011, Amazon Web Services suffered a days-long outage.

The number of online sites down include Instagram, Quora, IFTTT, The Verge, and hundreds more. Amazon has confirmed the problem, noting high error rates in one of its regions. Amazon acknowledged the issues on Twitter, and promised that it is “already working on it”.

Even if Amazon says that only one region is down, the entire situation is very unusual because AWS was built for these situations and other AWS regions should have been able to cover for the downed region. Many connected devices also weren’t working properly.

Given Amazon’s massive reach, cut your favorite websites a little slack if they’re acting amusing today – it might not be their fault.

Disruptions have been rare because Amazon has many redundant systems in place, said Gene Munster, head of research for Loup Ventures. Whatever might be the reason, this situation reminds us of the DDoS attack that disrupted Dyn’s systems.

The internet giant has yet to reveal the cause of the breakdown, which is plaguing storage buckets hosted in the US-East-1 region.

Notably, Netflix’s streaming service remained available, despite the fact that Netflix is making heavy use of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure as well.

Did you experience downtime of any specific service or website? Share your views with us.