S3Hub allows you to view your S3 online storage, upload, download, set permissions, share with friends and more.

So I experienced a little hiccup with Amazon S3 this morning, the service I use for images on kongi.com. I noticed that images weren't being served somewhere near about 8:30 AM Eastern. Access to a separate JungleDisk share was down too, so I gathered it wasn't just some issue with my one account. I sent a message of to AWS, then went in to the office.

Things were still down when I got to the office around 9:15. I did some Googling and found that what I suspected to be true. S3 was experiencing some wider spread outage. Center Networks reported that twitter had broken avatar images. They use S3 for avatars only apparently. See the image below. I checked with a few sites that I knew used S3, and noticed that they were experiencing the same problem. Among them were SmugMug and SlideShare.

I kept checking back and things appearred to come back up around 10AM Eastern. That means that we experienced about 1 1/2 hours down time.

What worries me about this is that when I went to the AWS site, there was no message about the outage. I was expecting that they would at least be able to tell developers that they knew about the situation and were working to rectify it, but no dice. So the question is, if your business relies on this, should you be scared? Maybe not, but there should certainly be a plan for recovery and redundancy on a separate service if necessary.

Ironic thing is that I twittered this message a few days ago:

More discussion about the downtime at Techcrunch.