Was the Internet not working today? It’s not you, it’s Amazon

Were you experiencing an unusual amount of pages not loading? It’s not your computer or your internet connection; it’s actually Amazon’s fault.

On February 28th, 2017, Amazon Web Services, the cloud service branch of Amazon that hosts many websites, went down due to a failure with its hosting platform. Popular websites like Slack, Medium, Quora, and Imgur were among those that were affected.

Error message on Grammarly.

On Amazon’s status dashboard today, Amazon stated that the Eastern US was the region experiencing problems. This is strange since normally other regions should be able to cover for the outage. Regardless, many websites started to load again later in the afternoon EST, and Amazon stated that the service was fully up and running at 5:08 PM EST.

The outage is estimated to have affected 20% of the internet.