Amazon Web Services Down, Funny Twitter Reaction

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Have you spent half the day banging your head against a wall because all the websites you need to access for work (or to avoid working) won't seem to load? Well, you're not going crazy — at least, not literally.

Amazon Web Services — a subsidiary of Amazon.com and the largest cloud computing system in the nation — experienced an outage of its S3 data storage service today, and it's affecting a looooot of people.

How big is AWS, exactly? It hosts 148,213 websites and 121,761 unique domains, according to Similar Tech. Some of its most high-profile clients include sites like Netflix and Snapchat.

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And while Amazon claims to have "99.99999999% durability," today the internet got a taste of what that other 0.0000001% looks like.

It is believed that the outage began at around 12:35 EST. The main issue occurred at AWS' S3 storage system on the East Coast, which is the largest of three in the U.S. The root cause remains unclear.

What we do know is that many websites have been either down altogether, or running at a painfully slow rate over the last several hours. Think: Slack, Medium, Imgur, Soundcloud, and Quora. Even digital media outlets like Mashable and BuzzFeed were impacted at some point.

The Amazon Web Services Twitter account hasn't provided any updates since a mid-afternoon tweet that read: "For S3, we believe we understand root cause and are working hard at repairing. Future updates across all services will be on dashboard."

And even though there has been some progress, there's no word on when services will be fully restored for all users.

Naturally, people on Twitter have been freaking out for the better part of the day. Ahead, some of the funniest reactions.

We will die on this hill. pic.twitter.com/FzMxD7vFHH
— Mashable (@mashable) February 28, 2017

Good news. Amazon has found the cause of the massive outage and is implementing the fix. Live video: pic.twitter.com/FIUwd3OZEf
— Jon Passantino (@passantino) February 28, 2017

Me: explain to me like I'm 4 yrs old: amazon s3
Engineer: imagine you need to make coffee but someone took the coffee pot and smashed it
— Hayden Broberg (@haybro1021) February 28, 2017

When the internet goes down and you are forced to go outside and observe the world #Amazon #S3 @awscloud pic.twitter.com/B1vimS2wVK
— Pavan Sethi ??‍? (@sethi_pavan) February 28, 2017

Amazon S3 has never suffered an outage. Period!
— Sean Spicer (@TrumpPressRoom) February 28, 2017

wow this amazon outage is really taking a toll pic.twitter.com/7efX84789P
— Jarry (@jarry) February 28, 2017

the year is 2019. Amazon S3, upgraded to the self-aware Amazon S4, decides to prevent all future outages. permanently. with nukes
— very bad timelines (@WorstTimelines) February 28, 2017