A huge chunk of the internet has been wiped out today from Amazon Web Services (AWS) having a center go down on the East coast. The timing is uncanny. Does RW use AWS for their MMS backend?
FYI: MMS started failing early this afternoon on both my and my wife’s phone. Did all the usual fixes from DOC-1861 and opened a ticket. Around the same time, RW posted to their @rwhelp Twitter account (and the RW Status page) that MMS was down. My ticket was updated that it’s related to the master issue.
If Cloudfront is hosting the MMS backend, yea, our MMS is hosed for now. AWS going down has been screwing everything up today.
Thanks for the info.
The MMS issue is noted on Republic’s status page, which itself is experiencing issues possibly related to CloudFront’s CDN network. I do not know that MMS itself is directed over any Amazon properties.
I’ve been watching the RW status page for a few hours, and “Degraded Performance” has spread to all the items other than Calling, Republicwireless.com, and Community.
Is the status page loading for you? It’s not for me but, perhaps, I’m not being patient enough.
Yea, I can see it no problem. Hitting refresh loads it instantly for me; I haven’t seen it hiccup once.
http://status.republicwireless.com/
As of 3:03PM ET:
Sadly, hitting refresh in either Chrome or Safari on macOS provides no relief for me. That I know of their are acknowledged issues with MMS and voicemail. SMS (and I just tested this) is working for me.
MMS just started working again.
Wife sent me an MMS. I checked, and was able to send one to myself.
Confirmed: RW does use AWS as their backend!
From the RW status page:
Identified - We apologize for the continued service disruption. Services are beginning to recover as a result of Amazon Web Services stabilizing: https://status.aws.amazon.com. We expect services to recover gradually, and are working to ensure we restore service to our customers as quickly as possible.
Feb 28, 17:24 EST
When MMS started working again, I checked the AWS status page. It showed their services were restoring.
Can anyone confirm that they have gotten MMS messages that were sent while the outage was ongoing? I’m a bit scared they are lost, as multiple MMS messages sent to my phone now have immediately been delivered, but messages sent to me a few hours ago have not.
Yes- I noticed the outage when two of my home automation messages didn’t arrive. I then manually sent a message, and it didn’t arrive either, so I sent RW a tweet. Near the end of the outage, all three SMS arrived. So they were queued, just couldn’t be delivered.
