What does one do when the Internet fails? Today, there were widespread interruptions reported along the east coast. The culprit: an Amazon AWS S3 outage, as reported by TechCrunch and others.  According to the TechCrunch post, even though Amazon S3 is “…used by less than .8 percent of the top 1 million websites,” it was having a major effect.

Users of popular applications including Canva, Mailchimp, Trello, Wix, Buffer, and even (ironically) isitdownrightnow.com were all experiencing issues, keeping social media managers for those companies very busy on Twitter as they tried to reply (in multiple languages) to frustrated customers. There were also tweets from some busy, but stalled, practitioners. Including, yours truly.

It caused frustration for many

It’s not you…. #Amazon web servers are down. Problems w/ #Mailchimp #canva
Ugggggggggggggggg https://t.co/oDHx0M96zB pic.twitter.com/372ZyNyZFs

— TopNonprofits (@TopNonprofits) February 28, 2017

It made this guy’s presentation a lot tougher

The moment the presenter realizes S3 is down. #AWS #S3 #Amazon pic.twitter.com/S8gY1J9lrH

— Ian Sherwood (@ian_surewould) February 28, 2017

Some reported getting service back

@canva its back!! pic.twitter.com/TwW6cEXcc1

— Ale-Community ️ (@alewam1) February 28, 2017

We are happy to see that @Alewam1 was back on Canva, but as of 4:07 pm, EST we were still experiencing issues with some other applications.  A good time to take pen to paper and write out a solid social media strategy, perhaps?

Curious to hear if and/or how the outage affected you and your work today and anything you have learned to do as a result?