Massive S3 outage

developer.amazonwebservices.com

42 points by ptm 18 years ago

Massive S3 outage. Seems to affect other AWS services (SDB, SQS) as well.

Other AWS services are down too ... EC2 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19715&tstart=0 SQS http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19713&tstart=0

henning 18 years ago

Interestingly, my desktop applications did not go down this morning. It was right there waiting for me as I sipped my coffee.

It also didn't go down all the times the 37Signals web apps I pay for or the hosted FogBugz installation my company uses have gone down.

Desktop apps rock! :)

  • bfioca 18 years ago

    My PC crashed while I was reading your comment. :)

    • iamelgringo 18 years ago

      Yeah, My PC crashed while I wa

    • henning 18 years ago

      Of course, I have lost massive amounts of valuable data because hard drives crashed and, like 95+ % of PC users, I don't back things up.

      • pchristensen 18 years ago

        Bingo. Lesson learned: Data in one place is going to die. Data in two places is probably going to live. Defense in depth.

        Lesson NOT learned: S3/my hard drive/Carbonites/etc rulz!

        • gibsonf1 18 years ago

          Note: we had no data loss or corruption with the S3 outage

eugenejen 18 years ago

So it is 6 hours complete outage in around 22 months since its opening beta. The lifetime outage is somewhat around 6/(30 * 22 * 24) = 0.00037 = 0.037%! I think this is pretty impressive achievement to build a system with uptime as 99.963%. Especially for some poor engineers woke up at 2am in Seattle and started to figure out what went wrong and get it back on line. I think it is pretty cool.

In the case when our PCs/Macs crashed. Even I could rush to a Circuit city/JR store to get a replacement hard drive. I probably will spend the same amount of time just to revive my system, given I have good habit back up the system. If that is not the case, I will need to reinstall operating system and applications. I guess the down time may be 24 to 48 hours.

So the downtime for a person without good habit in backup. The uptime will be 99.849%! if it takes 24 hours to get back the system in 22 months.

  • boredguy8 18 years ago

    3 9's uptime as "pretty impressive"? You must be a programmer.

    • eugenejen 18 years ago

      Yes. as a lousy programmer and lousy administrator myself, I am pretty impressed at 3 9's for a new system that support HTTP DELETE, PUT under heavy load can reach such record. I am too ignorant to know any WEBDAV based system can be that reliable under the same load. And I am also amazed that the downtime for my PCs/Macs is far inferior than an immature s3! And I am also wondering the day those systems can be as reliable as telecom's 5 9's (5 minutes/year).

      • trevelyan 18 years ago

        We use them commercially too, and I am very happy. For a system that is under development (and presumably iterating internally), support has been nothing short of fantastic.

johnrob 18 years ago

I think the internet needs an S3 clone, offered by another company. Both companies would be better off because of eachother.

S3 is still more reliable than a couple of dedicated servers, though :)

  • randallsquared 18 years ago

    "S3 is still more reliable than a couple of dedicated servers, though "

    Maybe. I've had colo or dedicated servers since 2000, and the last time I had one fail in any way was in 2001. I move servers every 2-4 years to newer, faster hardware, but even so, my current uptime is longer than S3 has existed.

    • foonamefoo 18 years ago

      I was worried people were going to reply with a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Thank you for resisting the urge.

      • randallsquared 18 years ago

        I'm not quite sure if you really think I resisted the urge (presumably because I used "maybe"), or if you were being sarcastic. :)

zemaj 18 years ago

Phew, back up. Although that the fact that it was possible to have the entire network go down is quite worrying.

S3 actually has an SLA; http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla If I'm reading that right, if S3 is completely down for more than about 40 mins in Feb (which it was - about 90 mins by my count) then we should get a 10% discount for this month. Is that right?

  • goodgoblin 18 years ago

    I'm still getting spotty S3 service

    • zemaj 18 years ago

      Yeah actually only HTTP object GET requests seem to be working for me (although they're working 100% of the time).

      • goodgoblin 18 years ago

        It seems to be back on. I wonder if the outage's length had something to do with it being so early on the west coast.

xirium 18 years ago

Bummer. Would anyone like backup virtual hosting on our physical servers?

gibsonf1 18 years ago

Our site seems to be running fine (EC2/S3). We actually have all files currently on EC2 and backed up to S3 (We haven't checked to see if the backup is still working yet)

  • gibsonf1 18 years ago

    From our S3 Logs from our EC2 instance ()which saw no interruption): The first failure we had was at 4:25 this morning, no success until 7:08, then mixed results, now full success since 8:55

goodgoblin 18 years ago

Fudge - ec2 is working for me, but s3 reads and writes are not. Guess its time to get to work on some kind of failover...

tlrobinson 18 years ago

Today was the day I was going to tackle the S3 component of our application... and I wake up to see this.