Amazon breakdown in cloud computing affects eastern U. S.

NEW YORK — A glitch Tuesday in Amazon’s cloudcomputing service, Amazon Web Services, in its eastern U. S. region, caused unprecedented and widespread problems for thousands of websites and apps.

Beginning around midday on the East Coast, one region of its “S3” service based in Virginia began to experience what Amazon, on its service site, called “increased error rates.” Amazon is the largest provider of cloud computing services in the U. S.

In a statement, Amazon said as of 3 p. m. central time that it was still experiencing “high error rates” that were “impacting various [ Amazon Web Services] 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,” the company said.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, stores files and data for companies on remote servers. It’s used for everything from building websites and apps to storing images, customer data and customer transactions.

“Anything you can think about storing in the most cost- effective way possible,” is how Rich Mogull, chief executive officer of data se-

curity firm Securosis, puts it.

Amazon had not described the cause of the problem late Tuesday, so it’s hard to know just how serious the failure is, Mogull said. “We do know it’s bad,” he said. “We just don’t know how bad.”

The problem affected both “front- end” operations — meaning the websites and apps that users see — and back- end data processing that takes place out of sight. Some smaller online services, such as Trello, Scribd and IFTTT, appeared to be down for a while.

The corporate message service Slack, by contrast, stayed up, although it reported

“degraded service ” for some features. Users reported that file sharing in particular appeared to freeze up.

The Associated Press’ own photos, Web feeds and other online services were also affected.

Major cloud- computing system failures happen periodically. In 2015, Amazon’s DynamoDB service, a cloudbased database, had problems that affected Netflix. But usually providers have workarounds that can get things working again quickly.

“What’s really surprising to me is that there’s no fallback — usually there is some sort of backup plan to move data over, and it will be made available within a few minutes,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights

& Strategy.

Amazon Web Services is the company’s fastest- growing and most profitable division, generating $ 3.5 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter in a $ 10.8 billion market. Amazon is the biggest cloudservices provider, with data centers around the world that handle the computing power for many large companies.

More than 1 million clients use the service, according to Amazon, including established corporations such as GE, startups such as Snap, and government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.