Generally, we associate Amazon with video streaming and impulse buys from the internet. So that Amazon’s servers going down would be a problem for the wider internet would seem silly. But it’s happening. And it’s a good illustration of how, behind the scenes, Amazon is the fundamental backbone of much of the internet.
Why? Because of Amazon’s behind-the-scenes web services. Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, is basically the digital storage locker for almost every website on the internet. Designed much like Amazon’s own site, the role is simple: Websites put everything from pictures to code backups in storage, and pay a small fee to store it and pull it out and use it when needed. It’s particularly handy because you can just store your whole website on there, pretty much, making it a dirt cheap hosting method for a number of websites, especially ones that see a large amount of traffic like Netflix, Reddit and others.
Of course, that creates a problem. If Amazon’s servers hit the skids, it takes your site with it, and that’s what’s happening across the internet. Fortunately, today’s outage seems mostly to be screwing up smaller sites like Trello and Quora, so far. But it’s a good reminder of just how much of the stuff we use relies on, of all companies, the people we just bought a t-shirt featuring a cat riding a unicorn from.
(Via The Verge)