If you’re experiencing some problems getting around the Internet today, that may be because of an outage currently affecting Amazon Web Services, the Amazon-owned platform that many websites rely on to keep their pages humming.
Amazon confirmed that it was experiencing a “high error rate” in one of its regional data centres around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
The company confirmation, posted to AWS’s status page, said the outage was also “impacting applications and services dependent on S3,” the company’s popular cloud-based storage platform.
Slack, Medium and Quora were among the services to be affected by Tuesday’s outage. In addition, certain sites whose whole purpose is to check whether other sites are online also seemed to have been taken down by the incident.
A number of the Internet’s most visible companies are hosted on Amazon Web Services, including Airbnb, Expedia, Netflix, Quora and others. An outage in 2015 accidentally took down many of these services for several hours. And in 2011, AWS suffered a days-long outage.
It is unclear when the current outage may be resolved. A spokesman for Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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