An outage at Amazon Web Services' S3 system disrupted a number of websites on the afternoon of Feb. 28.
Here are five things to know.
- AWS is a "giant provider of the back-end of the internet ," according to USA Today. It is a cloud computing service, which provides companies data storage and web services on Amazon's network of servers. S3 is one of its storage tools, which many companies use to store videos, images or databases, according to Vox.
- On Tuesday, AWS experienced a four-hour outage. The outage began around 12:35 p.m. ET, according to Catchpoint Systems, as reported in USA Today. Operations were "fully recovered" by 3:49 p.m. ET, according to an update on Amazon's AWS Service Health Dashboard. The update, released 5:08 p.m. ET, went on to say the "Amazon S3 service is operating normally."
- There are 148,213 websites on the S3 system, according to USA Today, including business giants like Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest and Buzzfeed. AWS also provides services to healthcare companies such Calgary Scientific, Practice Fusion and Syapse.
- Although some AWS clients experienced slowdowns, not all of the websites were impacted, according to USA Today. Practice Fusion was one of the affected companies, reporting that its EHR service was experiencing issues due to an internet service interruption.
- An AWS Service Health Dashboard update at 2:35 p.m. ET said Amazon "believe[s] we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue." However, Amazon has not yet explained the cause of the outage, according to USA Today.