Copyright Charleston Post and Courier
CHARLESTON – In the early morning hours of Oct. 20, Amazon Web Services experienced a widespread systems error that temporarily knocked users offline across more than 100 of its platforms, disrupting access to email, popular websites and cloud-based applications — including tools used by local school districts. In Charleston County, for example, students were unable to access their district-issued computers for online learning. “The AWS outage has impacted our operations, both for student devices like Chromebooks and applications used by teachers, staff members and students,” spokesman Andy Pruitt said. Dorchester District 2 students also experienced problems. “The outage has impacted some websites and applications,” said Brian Bohannon, director of community engagement. In an early morning email to staff, DD2 wrote that “many instructional and administrative websites and applications are inaccessible due to the global outage of Amazon Web Services.” The outage impacted Amazon’s “US-EAST-1 Region” and spread to the social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal, among others, the Associated Press reported. The company best known for its online shopping business said it was starting to recover from the problem but by mid-afternoon, it was still reporting “degraded” systems. Amazon’s massive AWS business provides cloud computing infrastructure to some of the world’s biggest organizations. Its customers include government agencies, universities and businesses, which saw increased error rates and latencies logging into many platforms.
