AWS's S3 Facility Hit by Outage, Many Services Disrupted

The world's largest and busiest cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon Web Services, was hit by a widespread service interruption Feb. 28 at its northern Virginia data center that took down much of the company's S3 storage and a long list of services with it for several hours.

"Right now they need to wait it out, which is frustrating," Maislos said. "In the future they'd need to replicate the data to multiple regions and multiple cloud providers and it greatly impacts costs and operating complexity.

"Everyone affected should re-evaluate how current their backups are, where they are stored, and how to switch over to alternative locations automatically when an S3 issue is detected in the future."