Error: Images not available (January 15th)

Currently (Januari 15, 14:00 CET) there is an error in displaying all the images on Viewbook.com.

There is an unkown problem at our provider Amazon S3: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19714&tstart=0

We hope this issue is solved very soon, and we’re very sorry that this is happening. We hope it won’t take long before the images are back.

We let you know as soon as we know more..

Update: All is up and running again (16:00 CET). We let you know what exactly happened as soon as we know more.

Viewbook uses a service called S3 by Amazon to host the images you upload. At about 7:00am CST (13:00 GMT) their service experienced an outage that is affecting our service as well as thousands of other companies around the world that rely on the S3 service to host files.

Here is what happened, we’re very happy that Amazon fixed the outage quickly, and we have all the confidence in their service. Below are the statements from Amazon.

“Quick note to keep everyone up to date. The team continues to be heads down focused on getting to root cause on this morning’s problem. One of our three geographic locations for S3 was unreachable beginning at 4:31 a.m. PST and was back to near normal performance at 6:48 a.m. PST (a small number of customers experienced intermittent issues for a short period thereafter). Though we’re proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until it’s perfect. We will be providing additional information on this thread as soon as we have it.

Sincerely, The Amazon Web Services Team “

“Here’s some additional detail about the problem we experienced earlier today.

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.

Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we’re proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and© adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

Sincerely, The Amazon Web Services Team :