Internet meltdown: Amazon Web Services problems strike numerous websites

AWS has been thought of as one of the internet's most reliable services. Photo / 123RF

A regional data centre for Amazon Web Service (AWS) brought down large parts of the world wide web today.

The outage caused websites, apps and devices that rely on the web-based storage service to suffer either full or partial meltdowns.

AWS is a web-based storage service that hosts images, websites and backends for websites across the globe.

Amazon said AWS experienced "high error rates" - rather than an outage.

The company said the problem was also "impacting applications and services dependent on S3," the company's popular cloud-based storage platform.

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-East-1, which is impacting some other AWS services.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing. Future updates across all services will be on dashboard.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

Kiwi cloud-based accounting software company Xero was impacted by the outage for a number of hours. The company switched its accounting to AWS last year.

Affected websites and services included Quora, Business Insider, Giphy, image hosting at a number of publisher websites, filesharing in Slack, Trello, Brightcloud, and many more.

AWS has been thought of as one of the internet's most reliable services and hosts some of the internet's most visible companies, including Airbnb, Expedia, Netflix, and others.

At about 11am NZT, Amazon announced that it had resolved the issues.

"The Amazon S3 service is operating normally," the company said on its status page. It did not provide details on the cause of the outage.

A spokesman for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An outage in 2015 accidentally took down many of these services for several hours. And in 2011, AWS suffered a days-long outage.