Amazon Web Servers Were Down For Hours, Taking Many Sites With Them

For more than four hours Amazon's web servers were severely disrupted, leading to downtime for a large number of sites. Problems with Amazon's S3 hosting appeared on February 28, affecting services like Trello, Quora, and IFTTT.

There were also disruptions for Amazon Alexa and Nest thermostats.

Because of how many sites and services are reliant on Amazon hosting, outages of this sort can temporarily affect large swaths of the internet. Though they're also quite rare.

The issues began around 12:40 p.m. ET and service was fully restored after 5 p.m.