Z-Blog

Image by *extralab via Flickr

Zemanta extensions and plugins have stoped working two hours ago. We apologize to all our users and ask for patience. Since we believe in transparency, here’s the explanation:

Amazon is a company best known for their online bookstore, but in the world of web their most prominent offering is “infrastructure as a service”. It consists of Simple Storage Solution (S3) for serving static files, Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for running programs and some other interesting services.

Amazon’s web services are very economic offering for startups like ours. Unfortunately that also means that when their service has problems, several other services are affected. Today there have been serious problems with S3 which among other things caused Zemanta plugins to stop working.

Zemanta uses S3 for two main purposes: distributing javascript code which renders interface for our graphical user interface and serving small icons at the bottom of each zemified post. Since S3 stopped working our graphical interface cannot be loaded when you write your blog. Our backend service works without flaws so our partners using web API are not affected.

Since roll-out infrastructure itself is affected we cannot independently provide a fix. We would like to apologize to our users and will try to prevent such points of failure in the future. Please bear with us until Amazon fixes their service which should be very soon since there are many services affected.

UPDATE (0:30 GMT): According to Amazon Web services status page some users should already have Zemanta back and working again. Others will have to wait a bit more.

UPDATE: Service now works again.

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