Amazon Web Service, the world's largest cloud infrastructure service provider, has been hit by a widespread service interruption on February 28, Tuesday, at the company's data center facility in Virginia. The AWS S3's outage has taken down much of the e-commerce giant's S3 storage division, affecting dozens of websites and applications in the tech industry. The outage kicked off on February 28 around 0944 Pacific Time.

According to TechCrunch, AWS S3, Amazon's cloud-based storage service, has experienced widespread issues on Tuesday that led to major website applications falling online, losing images or running like treacle. The outage has managed to knock out almost half of the internet activities, it seems because most of those affected companies rely on AWS S3 for storage.

The cloud computing service is currently used by around 148,213 websites, and 121,761 unique domains, making it one of the busiest and largest cloud infrastructures, according to SimilarTech.

At 11:40 a.m. Pacific Time, AWS has fixed the issues with its own dashboard, and posted to Twitter a message, saying that the AWS dashboard has finally recovered. At around 12:15 p.m. Pacific Time, Network intelligence firm ThousandEyes reported that all the packet loss for the ongoing issue appears to be happening in the company's facility in northern Virginia. Amazon has an AWS data center facility in Ashburn, Virginia.

By 1:20 p.m. Pacific Time, AWS S3 has finally recovered in terms of the retrieval, listing, and deletion of existing objects, the company said. The AWS S3 is now working on restoring normal operation for the addition of new items to S3-based storage.

And finally, around 2:10 p.m. Pacific Time, AWS has announced that it's now fully recovered in terms of resolving the error rates it was seeing in the Service Health Dashboard. At that time, Amazon made the claim that the S3 service is now operating normally.

Some of the affected websites and application services include Amazon's Twitch, Adobe's services, Atlassian BitBucket and HipChat, Business Insider, Quora, Citrix, Cousera, Container technology powerhouse Docker, code repository site GitHub, Google-owned Fabric, Heroku, Trello, Securities and Exchange Commission, MailChimp, The MIT Technology Review, New Relic, Slack, image hosting at a number of publisher websites and many more.

Additionally, connected lightbulbs, thermostats, and other IoT-enabled devices are also being affected, which many of them were unable to control these IoT-enabled devices as a result of the massive outage.

Fortunately, Airbnb, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat's Bitmoji and Time Inc. were able to get back to work in the afternoon, AWS reported.

On the other hand, Cupertino-based Apple has experienced some issues with its App Stores, Apple Music, iCloud services, and other services on its system status page, but until now it's still not clear if this attributable to AWS S3's recent outage.

What Cause The Outage At AWS S3

Amazon has yet to reveal the main cause of the widespread outage which has plagued storage buckets hosted in the AWS's US-East-1 region. But Amazon has managed to identify the main cause of issue In the AWS Service Health Dashboard, Amazon posted that the recent S3 outage is due to high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1 region.

Amazon, for some technical reason, insists this isn't a service outage but rather a simple case of increased error rates. Amazon updated its status page and said that it's will continue to work to remediate the availability issue on the Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1 region.

AWS services and customer applications that rely on AWS S3 will continue to experience high error rates, according to AWS status page.

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Topics Amazon, AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, Cloud, Computing