Amazon’s AWS storage crashed in the middle of an AWSome conference

Amazon loves to talk about how great its products and services are – just like any other massive company — so the fact that it holds frequent conferences celebrating and educating people about Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't particularly odd. But for one of those events to land on the exact same day that AWS's storage services bites the dust and takes a huge chunk of the internet down with it? Now that's some serious bad luck.

Amazon's AWSome Day conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, started like any other, with speakers and tutorials and lots and lots of bragging about how extremely reliable and sturdy Amazon's internet services are. Then, as though AWS had made a deal with the devil and beelzebub had finally returned to claim its life, everything fell apart. AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3) bit the dust, sending countless sites into endless reloads and blank pages, and as of this writing the company is still trying to hammer out the kinks.

Here's the latest from Amazon:

Update at 12:52 PM PST: We are seeing recovery for S3 object retrievals, listing and deletions. We continue to work on recovery for adding new objects to S3 and expect to start seeing improved error rates within the hour.

Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.

As you can imagine, the unfortunate timing has put quite the damper on the AWSome day event. One video, captured by an audience member during a presentation utilizing the S3 service, perfectly captures the mood:

https://twitter.com/ian_surewould/status/836645989972918272?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

"Awkward" doesn't even begin to describe it.