Technology & IT | Sunday 5 March, 2017 7:46 am |

Usually people do not notice the “cloud” — unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon’s huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage.
Amazon Web Services suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern US region starting about midday Tuesday. The result: Unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps.
While few services went down completely, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies had trouble with features ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data from Amazon’s “simple storage service,” known as S3. Amazon services began returning around 4 p.m. EST, and an hour later the company noted on its service site that S3 was fully recovered and “operating normally.”
The breakdown shows the risks of depending heavily on a few big companies for cloud computing. Amazon’s service is significantly larger by revenue than any of its nearest rivals — Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s Cloud Platform and IBM, according to Forrester Research.
With so few large providers, any outage can have a disproportionate effect. But some analysts argue that the Amazon outage does not prove there is a problem with cloud computing — it just highlights how reliable the cloud normally is.
The outage, said Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, should not cause companies to assume “the cloud is dangerous.”
Amazon’s problems began when one S3 region based in Virginia began to experience what the company called “increased error rates.” In a statement, Amazon said as of 4 p.m. EST it was still experiencing errors that were “impacting various AWS services.”
Amazon S3 stores files and data for companies on remote servers. Amazon started offering it in 2006 and it is used for everything from building websites and apps to storing images, customer data and commercial transactions.
At S3 customers, the problem affected both “front-end” operations — meaning the websites and apps that users see — and back-end data processing that takes place out of sight. Some smaller online services, such as Trello, Scribd and IFTTT, appeared to be down for a while, although all have since recovered.
The corporate message service Slack, by contrast, stayed up, although it reported “degraded service” for some features. Users reported that file sharing in particular appeared to freeze up.