Amazon S3 systems failure downs Web 2.0 sites

A systems failure at Amazon's S3 hosted storage service this morning has affected a host of Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter and SumgMug, which are dependent on it for the delivery of their applications.

At 9:05AM PDT on Sunday (AEST 2.05 AM Monday) Amazon issued an outage report, claiming it was experiencing "elevated error rates with S3". According to Amazon, the outage affected sites in the US and EU.

As a consequence, a variety of businesses such as Twitter, digital photo sharing Web site, SmugMug and The Huffington Post all had issues. Twitterers were claiming their avatar images could not be displayed. The Huffington Post was also unable to display images to its stories, while SmugMug could not offer any service at all.

"We're not happy about it, of course, but we are prepared for it and expect there to be no data loss or any long-term reduction in service," said a post to the SmugMug homepage earlier this morning.

Another of the sites to be affected was Jungle Disk, which provides data and file storage. Its tag line is: "Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3."

However, at 5:12 PM PDT (10.12 AM AEST) the S3 site was restored.

"We are confirming that service in both the US and EU has been fully restored. We appreciate your patience. We will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation."