(USA TODAY) — SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon didn't, quite, break the Internet Tuesday but an outage of one of the main storage systems for its AWS cloud computing company caused headaches for hundreds of thousands of websites across the United States.
Portions of Amazon Web Services' Amazon S3 system went offline Tuesday afternoon, a service used by 148,213 sites according to SimilarTech.
The outage appeared to have begun around 12:35 pm ET, according to Catchpoint Systems, a digital experience monitoring company. It involved a storage system for Amazon's S3 service on the east coast, US-EAST-1. That system was Amazon's first of what now are three regions in the United States and is still the largest and is also where AWS rolls out new features, "so it's disproportionately big," said Lydia Leong, a cloud analyst with Gartner.