Major outage on AWS S3 causes havoc for millions

Websites, apps and IoT services all knocked offline

A major outage on Amazon Web Services's (AWS) S3 storage service caused chaos for a host of websites, apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices on Tuesday evening.

The outage lasted for around five hours, with Amazon blaming the downtime on issues with its widely-used S3 storage service in the major US-East-1 region of data centers in Northern Virginia.

"We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services," the firm said at the time.

The downtime caused widespread headaches, affecting - to name but a few - Adobe's cloud services, Amazon's Twitch, Docker, GitHub, iFixit, Kickstarter, Slack and Yahoo Mail. The downtime also floored Is It Down Right Now, and left Amazon unable to update its own AWS status dashboard.

Apple also acknowledged issues with its App Stores, Apple Music, FaceTime, iCloud services, iTunes, Photos, and other services on its system status page on Tuesday, but it's not yet clear if these were to blame on the S3 outage.

A number of IoT devices were also struck by Amazon's S3 outage, with users taking to Twitter to complain that they were unable to switch off their lights or, er, ovens.

On Tuesday afternoon, Amazon posted on its service health dashboard that the issue had been resolved: "As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally."

This isn't the first time that a chunk of the internet has been taken down by AWS. Back in September 2015, a similar fiasco pulled down Netflix, Reddit and SocialFlow.