UPDATE: Shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Amazon said that the affected services were fully recovered and operational.

=====Original Story ====
Sure, Amazon is a huge retailer and a giant media company, but its biggest presence is hidden from a lot of folks: It’s a massive internet host. Thousands of sites and companies rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) every day… so when there’s an outage, as we’re apparently seeing right now, the effects ripple far and wide.

Amazon’s AWS status page currently has a notice about “Increased Error Rates,” saying, “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. 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.”

Translating that out of Tech-ese and into English, it means that folks on the East coast trying to reach services that use Amazon’s web services are having a whole lot of trouble with it right now.

An enormous number of sites, including Airbnb, Business Insider, Expedia, Medium, Netflix, Quora, Slack, Trello, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are experiencing issues related to the outage, VentureBeat reports. Some portions of Amazon itself are also having issues.

We tried to look up the DownDetector report for Amazon Web Services but, ironically, DownDetector itself is returning significant errors trying to view the site.

Those are just a small fraction of the companies, large and small, that use AWS; we’ll update as we learn more, or when Amazon resolves the problem.

Update: Just before 3:00 p.m. (Eastern time), Amazon tweeted out, “For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing. Future updates across all services will be on dashboard.” The company did not provide an ETA for when those repairs might be finished.

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