Why an Amazon S3 outage is such a big deal

UPDATE: As of Tuesday evening, AWS resolved the issue with Amazon S3, fully recovering operations that were running at a high error rate through much of the afternoon.

Dive Brief:

Tuesday afternoon, shortly after 1 p.m. ET, internet access was disrupted after Amazon Web Services began having increased error rates in one of its East Coast computing regions.
"We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1," said AWS in a statement on its service health dashboard. "AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3."
Sailthru, One Medical, Quora, Business Insider, Expedia, Slack, Coursera, Jerky.com and Giphy were some the dozens of sites impacted by the outage.

Dive Insight:

If you were anywhere near Twitter Tuesday afternoon, you got to witness in real time the internet breaking. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but scores of companies rely on AWS, meaning both service complaints and memes mocking the outage were in ready supply.

#AWS #S3 is down… Checks news feeds to make sure world is still there.
— Andrew Del Prete (@AndrewDelPrete) February 28, 2017

Amazon S3 down. All the pagers have gone off. Grab a coffee and the Internet will be back soon https://t.co/jJd9AJTld3
— Rod Drury (@roddrury) February 28, 2017

As of now the disturbance is an annoyance, a (sometimes welcome) inhibitor to productivity. But the outage perfectly illustrates how reliant large swaths of the internet are on AWS. Many sites were either partially or entirely not working because of reliance on the service provider.

Recent market assessments found AWS now controls 40% of the cloud market. Together, Microsoft, Google and IBM command just 23% of the cloud market. Even though many companies try to rely on more than one cloud service provider, an outage from a vendor this dominant in the market will have widespread impact.