Amazon S3 storage issue affecting a lot of the Internet today - but not us

For the past couple of hours Amazon S3 has been experiencing (as Amazon loves to put it) "high error rates" in their East Coast zone. This is having some serious effects on a lot of the web at the moment as sites, parts of sites, pictures, etc. are randomly appearing and disappearing. Some of the big hosting providers who are heavily dependent on Amazon services are also suffering at the moment. The only thing we are using S3 for here is the not-yet-running Roku channel (and I'm not sure it's going to stay in S3 in the long run).  The rest of our services all live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 

This happens about once per year, though usually not for so long. At the moment Amazon says they believe they know the cause of the outage and are working to fix it. For a while today they could not even update their own dashboard to tell customers that there was an issue. I expect life will drift back to normal within the next few hours, depending on how bad the root cause of the outage is.  In the meantime, if it looks to you like a lot of your favorite web sites are broken - it's because they are. 

By the way -- Amazon is slowly recovering.  The S3 Files are now working, but only in Read-Only mode.  So most of the web sites are on-line again, but they cannot update them.