AWS Outage Affects Internet Retailers ... Except Amazon

Amazon.com announced Wednesday its Web Services platform (AWS) is back to normal. However, the company has yet to offer an explanation as to why its S3 service went down. Business Insider reports that during the four-hour disruption, 54 of the internet's top 100 retailers had a decrease of 20 percent or greater in site performance, and three websites went down completely: Express, lululemon and One Kings Lane. According to Apica, websites load times for many retailers, including Target, Disney Store and Nordstrom, increased by triple digits.

Total Retail's Take: While many e-commerce sites were affected by the AWS outage, Amazon and Amazon-owned Zappos seemed to be unscathed. In addition, Apple wasn't affected. However, while Apple uses AWS, it has openly also stated that it uses the Google Cloud as well. This seems to be the first major outage the S3 platform has had. It previously had smaller outages affecting social media sites such as Instagram and the recently shut down Vine.