Amazon AWS Outage Impact on Formsite

Formsite uses Amazon AWS to host our infrastructure and today they experienced an issue that caused widespread outages across multiple data centers. The AWS outage affected a large number of websites and online services, and the exact cause hasn’t yet been identified.

The architecture Formsite uses is spread across multiple data centers, but the issue impacted multiple data centers and made our outages unavoidable. The effects to Formsite included the inability to connect and log in to Formsite accounts, the inability to upload attachments to forms, and disruption of emails that may not have been delivered during the outage.

Important: The outage did not impact any saved data. Also, for those customers who were able to connect to forms and were able to successfully submit, the results were saved as normal. This outage affected the connections only—not the storage.

We will be evaluating what lessons we can learn and changes we can make to improve our communication during rare events like this. Today’s AWS outage was posted to our social channels at Facebook and Twitter, and our customer support staff stayed on point to communicate the status through the entire event.