Today's Outage

If you tried visiting our website today, you maybe have run into a message indicating that the website wasn't working correctly. We know that not being able to place orders with your vendors (like ICE) can really make a mess of your day, so please accept our apologies if this outage affected you.

If you're curious, here's what happened:

Like many sites on the Internet, we depend heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for core functionality of our website. AWS rarely goes down, because Amazon has an incredible level of talent and expertise when it comes to managing Internet infrastructure, but when it does go down, the effects ripple out across the rest of the internet.

Well, today AWS experienced a massive outage and, as a result, many sites across the Internet, including ours, also experienced outages. All in all, our site was down for about 5 hours (between 10:58am and 4:10pm), but, as I write this, everything is back up and fully operational.

Once again, we're deeply sorry if this outage affected you.