I recently had to delete a multi-TB S3 bucket and learned that S3 isn't great at deleting tons of files either. The AWS Console just hangs forever. I let it go for hours before finding another solution.
It sounds like you’ve already resolved this, but for the benefit of any others that stumble upon this, my solution for deletion of a large bucket is to set a lifetime rule with a short TTL, after which the objects are deleted.
Set that rule, and come back to a beautifully empty bucket 24 hours later, after Amazon’s gnomes have takes care of the issue for you.
