Why the internet was so screwed up today

Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, the cloud computing service that backs many major sites and services, including Netflix, Airbnb, Giphy and 148,213 other sites, suffered a disruption on Tuesday, bringing large parts of the internet to a grinding halt.

Many of Mashable's AWS-backed systems, including Slack, Trello and our internal CMS slowed or became unresponsive shortly after 1 p.m. ET, confirming the disruption.

While the cause of the outage still hasn't been confirmed, Amazon acknowledged the problems on the AWS Twitter account and promised anxious users it was hard at work on a fix.

Amazon's AWS status page now claims all issues have been resolved and S3 service is functioning normally again.

When I first checked the AWS status page, I got a message reporting "Increased Error Rates" in the US-East-1 region. Unfortunately, the page itself was experiencing issues.

Thankfully for everyone's sanity, Twitter was largely unaffected. The internet community took to the platform to comment on the outage, sharing what news and updates were available:

In a cruel twist of fate, today just happened to be an AWSome Day training event in Edinburgh, Scotland. Talk about awkward timing.

Amazon reps haven't responded to our requests for comment or released any further information, so we don't know exactly what caused today's disruption. But we can guess why the outage crippled so many web services while some of the others using S3 were left largely unaffected.

Shawn Moore, CTO of web experience platform Solodev, thinks it comes down to how the AWS-based sites build out their platforms.

"The difference is that the ones who have fully embraced Amazon’s design philosophy to have their website data distributed across multiple regions were prepared," he said in an emailed statement to Mashable. "This is a wakeup call for those hosted on AWS and other providers to take a deeper look at how their infrastructure is set up and emphasizes the need for redundancy – a capability that AWS offers, but it’s now being revealed how few were actually using."

Essentially, this means that sites could've been spreading their data around to multiple regions within the S3 system, but didn't -- likely because it costs extra money. Just like anything else, a fully functioning internet comes at a cost.

This story is developing...