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Amazon Broke The Internet & Twitter CANNOT

Andrea González-Ramírez
February 28, 2017, 10:40 PM
Have you spent half the day banging your head against a wall because all the websites you need to access for work (or to avoid working) won't seem to load? Well, you're not going crazy — at least, not literally.
Amazon Web Services — a subsidiary of Amazon.com and the largest cloud computing system in the nation — experienced an outage of its S3 data storage service today, and it's affecting a looooot of people.
How big is AWS, exactly? It hosts 148,213 websites and 121,761 unique domains, according to Similar Tech. Some of its most high-profile clients include sites like Netflix and Snapchat.
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And while Amazon claims to have "99.99999999% durability," today the internet got a taste of what that other 0.0000001% looks like.
It is believed that the outage began at around 12:35 EST. The main issue occurred at AWS' S3 storage system on the East Coast, which is the largest of three in the U.S. The root cause remains unclear.
What we do know is that many websites have been either down altogether, or running at a painfully slow rate over the last several hours. Think: Slack, Medium, Imgur, Soundcloud, and Quora. Even digital media outlets like Mashable and BuzzFeed were impacted at some point.
The Amazon Web Services Twitter account hasn't provided any updates since a mid-afternoon tweet that read: "For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing. Future updates across all services will be on dashboard."
And even though there has been some progress, there's no word on when services will be fully restored for all users.
Naturally, people on Twitter have been freaking out for the better part of the day. Ahead, some of the funniest reactions.
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