A few calls came Tuesday morning to the IT support desk for Seattle Public Schools.
People had trouble using what's called a learning-management system.
It's hosted by Amazon Web Services and allows teachers to post lesson content and students to upload their work.
"We do have one service we have that's hosted there called Schoology and we noticed that some of our schools that are using it had trouble accessing it," said John Krull, the district's chief information officer.
Amazon Web Services provides cloud computing for thousands of companies, and an outage on the East Coast with its "simple storage system" caused what Amazon calls "increased error rates."
Many websites were crawling or showed only frowny-faced messages.
The Seattle Public Library catalog was running slow.
A site that tells you if a site is down, called "Is it down right now?" was itself down.
In the KIRO 7 newsroom, our radio-based police and fire scanners were working, but the new web-based ones were not.
The outage was perhaps most awkward at a conference in Scotland, where Amazon Web Services hosted what it called an #AWSome Day.
A participant posted video online of an Amazon presenter realizing the system was down.
Cox Media Group
