Business Technology Blog | RemoteRelief, Inc.

Did You Enjoy Your AWS Snow Day?

Written by Elizabeth Greenberg | 3/2/17 8:00 PM

Office workers now have their very own version of a snow day - except instead of gaining snow, we lose the internet. If your day went similarly to ours, about half our office was threatening their computers with violence around 9:30 AM; this is why.

 According to GeekWire,

Starting a little after 9:30 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, and lasting close to five hours, the S3 cloud storage service started experiencing “high error rates.” This outage knocked out access to a litany of websites and apps that run on AWS, including but not limited to Expedia, Slack, Medium, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The outage even temporarily affected the AWS service health dashboard, which displays outages and events.

Essentially anything connected to the Amazon Web Services, Simple Storage Service US-EAST-1, was just unavailable. In the example below, Wreck-It Ralph represents the employee error that took the servers offline.

 

Thankfully, instead of panic, the US population responded with wit and sarcasm: