Short Bytes:Around 1 PM PST, on Tuesday, many websites and services stopped operating after a widespread outage of Amazon Web Services. Specifically, Amazon observed high error rates with S3 (Simple Storage Service) in US-EAST-1. The service is used by many websites to host their resources. According to the official statement by Amazon, the five-hour outage was caused an incorrectly typed command by an employee.
This happened on February 28, when Amazon S3 started experiencing “high error rates”, causing chaos among many websites that depended on AWS to work. These sites and services include the likes of Medium, Slack, Quora, Giphy, Nest, etc.
S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud)August 16, 2025
Ironically, Amazon’s own ability to report problems was broken for a while. Many connected devices also weren’t working properly.
Amazon hasn’t outlined any specific fault. At the moment, Amazon claims to have fully recovered from the disruptions. Whatever might be the reason, this situation reminds us of the DDoS attackthat disrupted Dyn’s systems.
This outage also tells us how much of the internet is relying on a few companies to keep running. If we are unable to diversify our dependence on online services like Amazon S3, such downtimes are bound to happen from time-to-time.
Meanwhile, here’s thelatest updatefrom Amazon:
Update: Here’s theofficial statementfrom AmazonThe Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AMPST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that isused by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.
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