On Tuesday, Amazon observed high error rates with S3 (simple Storage Service) in US-EAST-1, the service used by many websites to host their resources. As a result of the outage, part of the internet that relied on the Amazon Web-based Service stopped operating.
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So many websites depends on the Amazon Web-based Service (AWS) to operate, mostly storing of images and hosting of the entire site. Sites like Quora, Nest, Slack, Giphy etcS3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017
Why would "high error rates" from Amazon Web-based Service (AWS) cause the part of the internet to go into the dark?
The answer is simple. Events like this would keep occurring when "too many" websites are hosted by the same service provider. A Large part of the internet would depend on a single service provider and in the event of something going wrong, a large part of the internet goes down.
Last year, Someone launched a DDoS attack on popular Domain Name (DNS) service provider Dyn which houses top websites like Twitter, Reddit, Github, Paypal, Airbnb, Spotify, Pinterest and so many other popular sites. The attack on Dyn made those popular sites that relied on Dyn services inaccessible, sending a huge part of the internet into the dark. Same happened with OVH.
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The internet wont be an easy target when website owners try to explore other service providers and not choke onto a single service provider.
An update from Amazon read:
As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.
So far, Amazon has recovered from the outage but the cause of the outage is yet to be made public. Click here to access Amazon health service dashboard