Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Amazon's cloud storage system had a massive outage Tuesday, disrupting service to several companies across the United States.
The outage began around 12:45 p.m. Eastern and was concentrated on companies on the East Coast using the AWS's S3 storage system in Northern Virginia.
Amazon Web Services said in an update on its website: "We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."
It noted it had "repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard."
Geek Wire said companies impacted include Expedia, Slack, Medium and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Venture Beat noted several sites are working slowly: Airbnb, Down Detector, Snapchat's Bitmoji and Time Inc.
Some websites that inform people when sites are down were not working. The cloud service was eventually restored.
Amazon has more than 40 percent of the cloud market, topping $12 billion in sales for the year.
On Sept, 21, 2015, AWS had a five-hour outage that also affected it Northern Virginia center. Affected were several companies and Amazon's own services, including Prime Instant Video.
