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Amazon S3 Storage Down?
Written by Allen Stern - February 15, 2008
Update Saturday - Amazon has posted an update regarding the outage.
Apparently Amazon's S3 storage hosting is down over thirty minutes as of 8:30AM ET. Most of the images are broken on CN because we use S3 for static file serving. There are several messages on the Amazon Developer Services message board regarding the outage. This morning I planned on posting my excellent experience with S3 so far and how we are using it on CN. I will still make the post, but will add a section on downtime now.
Please report in if you are seeing outages on your end. We will update this post if more details become available.
10:17AM Eastern - Amazon is reporting that everything is back to normal. They will provide more information on what happened later today.
Here's what it looks like on Twitter - they also use S3 for static file hosting:
Our Partners
We experience the same problem on tripsailor.com. Too late to think about disaster planning?
Yes its down. I am not able to access my files. I have my media files on s3 and now my readers cant see them.
I twittered about the same http://twitter.com/thej/statuses/715975432
All Amazon web services are down, not only S3. 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
Tumblr is reporting all images/audio down due to the outage.
None of our media content is working over at http://nonoba.com/ either.
Learned us a hard lesson on not relying 100% on an external partner for anything vital!
mydealbook.com and therealdeal.com are having the same issue. It appears to be system wide.
Great photoshop tutorial site, psdtuts.com is having image issues.
Images on Ma.gnolia are affected as well. Let's see how quickly the servers will be up again.
Digg here - http://digg.com/hardware/Amazon_S3_World_s_most_reliable_web_service_is_DOWN
My site got badly hit. Had to divert all the bandwidth to local webserver :(
Compete.com also affected for some stuff.
Amazon S3 seems to be back up and running, at least for Tripsailor.com
S3 is back.
This just puts Amazon were it belongs - with the rest of us. For this just proves that anyone can be down. ;-) Isn't it a true relieve?
The thing to consider is to finally create a backup plan for all your S3/EC2/SQS things. And now we know why Akamai charges an arm and a leg for their CDN. :-)
I am just waiting for Google Mail/Google Apps to be down. Think of that, so many people without their email? That would probably be a revolt.
We've looked at using S3 as archival storage and backups, but I've never thought of them as a true CDN. Are the geographically replicated? Do they make attempts to route individuals to the closest location? Try to go cheap on content distribution and this is likely going to happen.
wow I got out and the internet breaks.... Just shows you how much people have come to rely on it, I bet Amazon.com was not down :p
Maybe some instances on EC2 had issues, but none of ours there were affected. Even S3 actually appeared to be up in Europe. AWS is getting unfairly bashed in many corners IMO. We've been on S3 for about 9 months, and this is first major issue. We keep enough recent data on our webservers that we just switched over for a few hours w/o too much pain for our users. Of course need a plan B if want 99%, but if anyone knows a plan A only that has five 9s at less cost than a redundant solution than pls let me know!
Every single submission at Shutterpond was affected. Users could not add/vote on photos for most of the morning.. However it was a small con, considering the price of using s3 services.
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.
The point is, since terrabyte hard drives are affordable nowadays and internet traffic grows steadily, the stress goes on content delivery rather than on storage. If you are not concerned about 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.
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