
Amazon.com stays up while AWS goes down - dev-joebar
Curious exactly what scaling mechanisms were in place that kept amazon.com up while much of AWS was down.
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luhn
It was Amazon S3 US Standard (us-east-1) region that went down. This caused
quite a lot of pain throughout the internet because people were using S3 as
storage for their application and/or their static assets.

Other AWS services were affected, but this was mostly limited to creating,
updating, and deleting AWS resources (EC2 instances, RDS instances, CodeDeploy
deployments, etc.). There were no issues I'm aware of for already-provisioned
resources. There was also some issues with the AWS console.

So Amazon.com was able to weather the storm because it did not have a hard
dependency on S3 US Standard. They may not use S3 behind the scenes, they may
be using another region, or they have cross-region replication to serve files
from redundant regions.

EDIT: Another option, they may have put S3 behind a CDN and were able to lean
on the CDN's cache while S3 was down.

