Buffer and the AWS Outage: How This Interruption May Have Affected Your Posts

tl;dr – Buffer experienced interrupted service due to the AWS outage on Tuesday. All is back to normal now, and all posts are going out as expected.

We know how important a reliable social media experience is for you, and we recognize how interruptions to Buffer can have a significant impact. We’re incredibly sorry for the disruption we caused you today.

Here is precisely what happened and how it may have affected you.

What happened

For several hours on Tuesday, one of Buffer’s main hosting providers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage. The AWS outage affected a number of major websites and tech tools, including Buffer. You can read more about the outage here.

Specifically, the downtime with AWS interrupted Buffer’s ability to send scheduled posts, both text posts and posts with media attachments like photos or videos.

We have since returned to full service. AWS is back up, and all scheduled posts are being sent as expected.

How the interruptions may have affected you

During the outage, we experienced interruptions with our ability to send scheduled posts. Particularly, this had a big impact on scheduled posts with media attachments of photos or video.

When these posts fail, you may notice this in a couple ways:

1. We send an email to the account owner of the social profile, letting you know that the post failed to go out.
2. We mark the failed post in the Buffer dashboard with a red tag to indicate that it wasn’t published.

If you’ve seen either of these messages regarding your social media updates, we’re incredibly sorry for the trouble and for the extra work we’ve caused you.

We’d love to do all we can to get things back on track for you.

You can resend any failed updates directly from the Buffer dashboard.

To do so, go to your social profile and to the posts that failed. You can retry these failed posts in a couple of ways:

1. Retry now, which will publish the post right away.
2. Retry in Buffer, which will send the post to the end of your queue to publish at the next available time slot

Any questions? We’re here to help

We’d love to do everything we can to get things working perfectly for you and to answer any questions or concerns at all. If you’re still seeing trouble with your posts, you can reach us at hello@buffer.com, on Twitter @buffer, or in the comments of this post.

Many thanks again for your support of Buffer and your grace with us in situations like this! Have a wonderful Wednesday. ☺️