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July 20, 2008

Posterous Outage: Amazon S3

We're currently monitoring a major outage by our data storage provider, Amazon S3. Our support for images, video, documents and files has been unfortunately out of commission all afternoon.

We've also suspended email processing during this outage to make sure that your data is safe. We will start posting the emails you've sent us as soon as Amazon S3 comes up.

Here's the latest word from Amazon on the situation:

2:36 PM PDT We have restored all internal communication across Amazon S3 hosts. We have started the multi-step process to begin accepting requests across Amazon S3 locations.

3:07 PM PDT We are attempting to bring EU back up now, followed by our US locations. EU will be first due to the smaller number of hosts. No data has been lost during this incident.

For the latest on Amazon status, see their Service Dashboard. Rest assured your data is safe and we're working hard to restore service as soon as we can.

Edit: All services are back up. We are in the process of working through our backlog of emails that you've sent us. Thanks for using posterous.



Comments (6)
July 20, 2008

Marcelo Avero said...
Ok... Shit Happens

July 20, 2008

Garry Tan said...
Aint that the truth? =)

July 20, 2008

Chris Darling said...
Compliments on your mode of communication through this ordeal, like Posterous Garry you're Ace!

July 20, 2008

Ben Wong said...
they should really do something about those outages, tons of web2.0 sites run on S3

July 21, 2008

Timon said...
@ Chris: I agree, Garry's mode of communication was absolutely excellent yesterday!

July 21, 2008
Seth Caldwell said...
When I first started using S3 I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Within 24 hours, I had my entire web imaging system (heavy user contribution) using s3. However, I wish amazon's .NET methods had
included some setup in web.config that would have specified a local cache folder should their service ever go down. I'm programming this myself now, and using a getFileLink() method around any s3 hosted file. It checks s3 status every 5 minutes. If s3 is down, it uses the local cache for the next 5 minutes.
Essentially, it adds our own local servers to the 'cloud'. I'm surprised s3 didn't provide this feature in the first place.

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