Lights Out for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) all of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Outage Shutters Twitter and Thousands of Other Websites

It's not only S3 that got hit; all the Amazon services are dead, including EC2 and SQS: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19714&tstart=0 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19715&tstart=0 We experience the same issue: http://www.web20friends.net It happens to the best of us. And now we can see who relies on their backbone… -Ivo

[...] http://sitening.com/blog/2008/02/15/lights-out-for-amazon-simple-storage-service-s3-shutters-twitter... http://www.linkfog.com/2008/02/15/amazon-s3-goes-down-panic-ensues/ http://blog.tripsailor.com/2008/02/broken-images-amazon-s3-down.html http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-error http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/02/download-issues.html Posted in web20. Tags: amazon, aws, ec2, s3, sqs, webservices. [...]

[...] In today’s installment all of Amazon web services are in-operational. [...]

[...] Local Nashville tech company Sitening has more details of the outage. This entry was written by Jackson Miller, posted on February 15, 2008 at 9:10 am, filed under [...]

[...] take down Amazon Yikes, I write about Amazon’s Web services last night and today those services go down for the first time I can remember. CenterNetworks has info on the outage too. Looks like things are coming back online now, though. [...]

Hi Jon, this is Ben from bigsight! I didn't even notice the outage until I saw this blog entry. I use S3 for backups, and have an EC2 running for some testing. Luckily the EC2s didn't reboot, which is always a pain. I found your entry from our new entity pages, which now feature user content: http://bigsight.org/city/nashville

Ben, I love what you're doing with bigsight.org. Dan's been showing me sneak peeks of your latest features. I can't wait to see them go live! Oh, and thanks for the love on your home page ;)

[...] use Amazon’s S3 storage service to store all the data for their Websites. Reports started coming in across the Web, email, and Twitter about the outage (Twitter only uses S3 for file hosting, not its [...]

[...] whose name I forget all the time) has seen it’s first major outage (1-2 hours according to Sitening). sure, this happens all the time. I can’t think of many (any?) web-services which [...]

[...] “spotty.”The outage, which may have spread to other Amazon web services, appears to be affecting many web businesses, including prominent ones like Twitter, which uses the service to store the [...]

[...] (AMZN) Web Services unit experiences outage: Amazon’s hidden jewel powers many cutting-edge Web 2.0 startups such as [...]

There is a very important question you have to ask yourself before deciding whether to use S3: what are you really looking for - remote storage, content delivery, or both. These are crucial to distinguish. What I observe is that most people treat Amazon S3 as a content delivery service. While this is not inherently wrong, one has to notice that S3 was especially designed to be a STORAGE service. S3 does not claim to be a CDN. The point is, since terabyte hard drives are affordable nowadays and internet traffic grows steadily, the stress goes much more on content delivery and network infrastructure rather than on storage. If you are not concerned about using remote storage, there are much better services especially suited for content delivery. SteadyOffload.com provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload static content. The whole mechanism there is quite different from Amazon S3. Instead of permanently uploading your files to a third-party host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. Content remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached object on their server is dynamically generated at page loading time, very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking. This means that there is an almost non-existent chance that the cached content gets exposed outside of your web application. It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a storage service like S3 but exactly a service for offloading static content. Watch that: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8193919167634099306 (the video shows integration with WordPress, but it is integrable with any other webpage) http://www.steadyoffload.com/ http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization/Offloading Cost of bandwidth comes under $0.2 per GB - affordable, efficient and convenient. Looks like a startup but lures me very much. Definitely simpler and safer than Amazon S3.