Amazon Web Services (known as AWS) provides a number of web-based products but their most popular is probably S3 (Simple Storage Service). It provides ‘cloud’ storage and is used by numerous sites and businesses throughout the world. Last night it stopped working and that had an impact on many people as a result – probably, most noticeable for some, IFTTT was completely offline as a result.

However, something else didn’t work.

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

That’s right, Amazon’s own status dashboard didn’t show S3 as offline because, well, it was dependant on S3 to show it.

Some thought they knew the cause…

https://twitter.com/mathowie/status/836659635159379969

But that appeared to not be the case…

. @mathowie @mgsiegler red emoji works https://t.co/03OJFOo9im i think it is not on #S3

— Shashank Singh – bakstage.ai 🎙 (@shankybaba) February 28, 2017

It would appear that it changing colour is dependant on an RSS feed, and that’s what was on S3. However, this hasn’t been confirmed.

Let’s just hope this wasn’t correct…

"It hasn't impacted a broad enough range of our customers to qualify as an outage."

Actual words our AWS support rep just said to me.

— this place is cooked (@thicccccpikachu) February 28, 2017

None-the-less, making your status page dependent on the service whose status the page is reporting, is probably not the best idea.