Skip to main content

The Amazon S3 Outage - When the Internet's Hard Drive Fails …

Denis Goodwin

Last week, SmartBear observed a sudden and protracted 5X increase in web page timeout errors associated with the failure of Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage service. Looking a bit more closely at our data, we dug up a few more interesting angles on the impact of the failure.

Event Timeline

The issue hit suddenly – we saw an immediate spike in errors at 12:35 p.m. EST, and by 12:45 p.m. EST, error rates were 5X normal. For some specific types of timeout errors, the spike was more than 10X normal. At 3:30 p.m. EST, the error rate began dropping and by 3:50 p.m. EST, rates had returned to normal.


Web vs. API

The issue hit web pages hard, while API monitors were not noticeably impacted by this outage. Web pages and web apps often utilize content storage hosted by cloud services such as Amazon S3.

Common failure scenarios on Tuesday included page elements failing to load, which could cause either the whole web page to time out or specific content on a page might not render. Depending on the design of a given page, this partial content failure could be relatively minor or it could render a critical web journey non-functional. File uploads and downloads that rely on S3 storage endpoints were particularly hard hit.

In order to get a complete picture of application health, it's necessary to monitor your real user's journey through the application. The monitored user journeys that depended heavily on content hosted in S3 failed. Those that didn't have that dependency continued functioning. I personally experienced this with Slack – I was able to use the app, however files could not be uploaded presumably because these files are stored by Slack using S3 as the storage mechanism.

While far less pronounced than the spike in errors, some response time degradation was observed in API monitors that continued running successfully. Given that the issue affected Amazon's storage services rather than their hosting services for applications, this makes sense.

Geographic Impact

The issue was more acutely felt in the United States, but we observed impacts all over the globe. The spike in page errors was seen on websites dependent on Amazon S3, many of which are U.S.-hosted websites that are likely monitored from U.S. locations. Unsurprisingly, error counts spiked by as much as 25X in some U.S. monitoring locations. While not as significant as the U.S. locations, timeout and page error increases were also observed from Canada, Europe and Asia.

Takeaways

Much of the web is built on the backs of cloud providers. Most of the time, these cloud services provide a great user experience. Amazon will learn from the root cause of this issue and likely emerge from this outage more resilient than ever. It's impossible to control all aspects of these shared services – but here are three steps to take that are in your control.

1. Identify your business critical applications

2. Proactively monitor user journeys on these applications

3. Don't rely on your third party provider to tell you when it is down

It is key to utilize independent monitoring services to ensure your applications are up, functioning correctly and fast. Furthermore, missing content can be catastrophic or merely inconvenient to a critical user journey – it's important that your monitoring tool can be configured to know the difference.

Denis Goodwin is Director of Product Management, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

The Amazon S3 Outage - When the Internet's Hard Drive Fails …

Denis Goodwin

Last week, SmartBear observed a sudden and protracted 5X increase in web page timeout errors associated with the failure of Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage service. Looking a bit more closely at our data, we dug up a few more interesting angles on the impact of the failure.

Event Timeline

The issue hit suddenly – we saw an immediate spike in errors at 12:35 p.m. EST, and by 12:45 p.m. EST, error rates were 5X normal. For some specific types of timeout errors, the spike was more than 10X normal. At 3:30 p.m. EST, the error rate began dropping and by 3:50 p.m. EST, rates had returned to normal.


Web vs. API

The issue hit web pages hard, while API monitors were not noticeably impacted by this outage. Web pages and web apps often utilize content storage hosted by cloud services such as Amazon S3.

Common failure scenarios on Tuesday included page elements failing to load, which could cause either the whole web page to time out or specific content on a page might not render. Depending on the design of a given page, this partial content failure could be relatively minor or it could render a critical web journey non-functional. File uploads and downloads that rely on S3 storage endpoints were particularly hard hit.

In order to get a complete picture of application health, it's necessary to monitor your real user's journey through the application. The monitored user journeys that depended heavily on content hosted in S3 failed. Those that didn't have that dependency continued functioning. I personally experienced this with Slack – I was able to use the app, however files could not be uploaded presumably because these files are stored by Slack using S3 as the storage mechanism.

While far less pronounced than the spike in errors, some response time degradation was observed in API monitors that continued running successfully. Given that the issue affected Amazon's storage services rather than their hosting services for applications, this makes sense.

Geographic Impact

The issue was more acutely felt in the United States, but we observed impacts all over the globe. The spike in page errors was seen on websites dependent on Amazon S3, many of which are U.S.-hosted websites that are likely monitored from U.S. locations. Unsurprisingly, error counts spiked by as much as 25X in some U.S. monitoring locations. While not as significant as the U.S. locations, timeout and page error increases were also observed from Canada, Europe and Asia.

Takeaways

Much of the web is built on the backs of cloud providers. Most of the time, these cloud services provide a great user experience. Amazon will learn from the root cause of this issue and likely emerge from this outage more resilient than ever. It's impossible to control all aspects of these shared services – but here are three steps to take that are in your control.

1. Identify your business critical applications

2. Proactively monitor user journeys on these applications

3. Don't rely on your third party provider to tell you when it is down

It is key to utilize independent monitoring services to ensure your applications are up, functioning correctly and fast. Furthermore, missing content can be catastrophic or merely inconvenient to a critical user journey – it's important that your monitoring tool can be configured to know the difference.

Denis Goodwin is Director of Product Management, AlertSite, SmartBear Software.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...