Amazon S3 Suffers Outage

Amazons S3 service suffered another outage this weekend, highlighting the risks inherent in cloud storage services.

The S3 service interruption started at approximately 8.40 AM PDT yesterday, according to Amazon, affecting customers in both the U.S. and Europe. "S3 for our customers in the European Union was operating normally by approximately 3 PM PDT," explained an Amazon spokeswoman in an email to Byte and Switch earlier today. "[The] U.S. began to recover at approximately 4 PM PDT and was operating normally by 5 PM PDT."

Still, that’s not an insignificant period of time for the S3 service to be interrupted, and it follows an outage earlier this year, which initially stirred up concerns about service reliability.

Specific details about what happened this weekend have not yet been released, although the Amazon spokeswoman offered the following explanation via email:

"As a distributed system, the different components of S3 need to be aware of the state of each other. For example, this awareness makes it possible for the system to decide which redundant physical storage server to route a request to.""We experienced a problem with those internal system communications, leaving the components unable to interact properly, and customers unable to successfully process requests. After exploring several alternatives, the team determined it had to take the service offline to restore proper communication and then bring service online again."

"These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to [a] root cause in such a situation -- we will be providing our customers with more information when we’ve fully investigated the incident."

"We’re proud of our operational performance in operating S3 for almost 2.5 years, and our customers have generally been pleased with the reliability and performance of the service. But any downtime is unacceptable and we won't be satisfied until it is perfect."

Clearly, Amazon still has some way to go before it achieves the nirvana of systems reliability. This weekend's blip underlines the fact that, despite all the vendor hype and growing popularity amongst end users, cloud storage is still very much an emerging technology.

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