Since its US launch in March 2006, preceding its European launch in November 2007, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service has now hit the buffers twice at time of writing; affecting sites such as Twitter, a fast-growing micro-blogging social-networking site who use S3 for static file hosting. This is also affecting Twitter clients such as Twhirl.

When working, the scalable storage infrastructure stores over 14 billion files of differing types for a variety of users including small start-ups and enterprise clients, who use the S3 service as a web-hosting service as well as a file-backup service, among other uses.

Amazon’s S3 Service last went down in February 2008, only around 5 months before this outage: Could this indicate an ongoing problem arising within the infrastructure? No such reports have been generated by any sources as far as I am aware; and if any such internal reports are circulating within Amazon then none have been leaked as far as I am aware.

The latest update on the situation that I have read at the time of writing; posted at 2:35PM PDT on this Sunday 20th, indicates that Amazon have the situation under control and that they are making good progress towards a resolution:-

“2:36 PM PDT We have restored all internal communication across Amazon S3 hosts. We have started the multi-step process to begin accepting requests across Amazon S3 locations.”

With luck it won’t be too long before the problem is totally eradicated, at least for the time being and the foreseeable future – But will there be a third outage this year? Any such further downtime would indicate serious problems and severely affect customer confidence in S3. Keep watching that space for maybe more downtime…