A Lot Can Happen When Amazon Web Services Breaks Down

Amazon’s web services suffered brief outages on Tuesday, knocking a lot of services offline and leaving many people pissed off. Although the company’s cloud computing division outage only lasted four hours, it still caused quite a headache around the internet.

When the company’s web hosting services go down, it can be bad. It is the one of the most widely used web hosting services out there. Websites like Trello, Quora, Instagram, Vine, and IMDb were all offline during the outage.

Although no big names were impacted, a lot of smaller names were and it just paints a picture on how many websites do rely on Amazon for their hosting. It could have been hundreds of thousands of companies that had trouble during the outage with their features.

For example, Nest’s app was unable to connect thermostats and other devices for awhile. Other businesses may have their videos stored using AWS or their images and databases.

Even Amazon’s Alexa wasn’t online.

Amazon reported “high error rates” in one region of its S3 web services on Tuesday and was actively working on “remediating the issue.” According to SimilarTech, the S3 system is used by 148,213 sites.

“This is a pretty big outage,” said Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester. “AWS had not had a lot of outages and when they happen, they’re famous. People still talk about the one in September of 2015 that lasted five hours,” he said.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.