Are you trying to get work done and it’s taking FOREVER for any site to load, getting tons of errors where you normally don’t? apps to download, or even trying to catch a break with your streaming TV?
Don’t panic! It’s not you, it’s Amazon.
A big outage is sweeping across the country right now, and Amazon Web services is to blame. Amazon Web Services is kind of like the backbone of a lot of your favorite websites and apps. You never really hear about it until something bad happens, but Amazon’s cloud storage is what helps lots and lots of websites and services store their content remotely so that people all over the world can access it as fast as possible. A ton of websites use it, and even hugely popular apps like Netflix rely on Amazon’s storage to handle their data, so when it goes down, it’s a pretty big deal. It’s also impacting Apple app downloads and a million other things.
The good news here is that you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t accidentally break your computer or click on a bad link; it’s just a hiccup in Amazon’s storage service. The bad news is that there’s really nothing you can do about it until Amazon fixes it themselves. The company already posted an alert saying that it’s seeing a lot of errors on its end, and it’s working to fix whatever’s wrong with the system, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before everything returns to normal.
I love how some companies are making the most of it, such as wedding site The Knot, who tweeted this picture within minutes of the outage (how true, how true)!
Twitter is a great place to follow along for updates and new funny memes as we endure, of all things, this sloooowwwww internet!
