Amazon’s S3 service, SmugMug’s primary storage provider, is currently experiencing problems. As a result, a large portion of the photos and videos stored on SmugMug are currently offline.
Historically, Amazon has been very stable. We’ve seen three of these in our entire history with Amazon (>2 years), including this one. I expect, like the last two, that service will be restored shortly. You can keep track of their efforts over on their own Status Dashboard.
Our faith in Amazon, and the care they take of your priceless memories, hasn’t been shaken. Your photos and videos are safe - which is our #1 concern. Since problems in this industry are inevitable, and Amazon’s performance over the last two years has been so exceptional, we’ve been afraid an outage like this. I’m sure there will be more over the next few years, too.
The important thing is that they’re few and far between, short, and handled properly. Every component SmugMug has ever used, whether it’s networking providers, datacenter providers, software, servers, storage, or even people, has let us down at one point or another.
It’s the name of the game, and our job is to handle these problems and outages as best we can. We’ve already spent the last few months investigating additional resources we can combine with Amazon to cover outage scenarios like the one we’re experiencing today, and have some promising prospects.
Please continue to check here and Amazon’s Dashboard for future updates. Thank you for your patience - we realize this is no fun, and we’re truly sorry it’s happening.
UPDATE: Amazon continues to make progress, we hope they’ll be online again soon, at which point we’re ready to re-enable SmugMug. A few of our newer customers have asked, so I’d like to point out that I believe this our first unplanned long (more than a minute or two) site-wide outage in well over a year, and we’re definitely going to take steps to reduce the likelihood of this recurring.
