Amazon Web Services (AWS) are back online following a four-hour outage that impacted hundreds of websites that use the company’s cloud hosting service, including Delta Airlines, TikTok and IMDB.
DownDetector monitors online outages and showed hundreds of thousands of issue reports from users worldwide who were unable to access AWS or websites that use that platform.
AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies worldwide, such as servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development and security.
The problems, which hit at 2:49 pm ET, stemmed from a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda at a data center in Virginia.
AWS Lambda lets customers run code for different types of applications.
The platform’s Health Dashboard states, ‘ as of 6:37 pm, the backlog was fully processed… and all AWS Services are operating normally.’
Amazon Web Services was hit with a worldwide outage that impacted hundreds of websites that use the company’s cloud-hosting service
The incident at Amazon Web Services disrupted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation.
That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day – the outlets said the blackout happened as Donald Trump was in court today.
Along with commerce sites, video games like Fornite, PUBG Battlegrounds and Dead by Daylight were also offline.
AWS’ service health dashboard showed ‘degradation’ among four services: AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Connect.
When AWS goes down, so do other websites that use its services, which is an embarrassing blow to the Amazon-owned platform – these companies, universities, individuals and governments pay to use the services.
AWS did not acknowledge the outage on its social media platforms but provided this message on the health dashboard: ‘We continue to experience increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region.
Amazon Web Services began experiencing problems around 2:56 pm ET, taking out other websites like IMDB, McDonald’s and OkCupid
Amazon Web Services began experiencing problems around 2:56 pm ET, taking out other websites like IMDB, McDonald’s and OkCupid
‘We have identified the root cause as an issue with AWS Lambda and are actively working toward resolution.’
However, AWS Support responded to a frustrated user on Twitter who tweeted that AWS console was down.
‘Sorry for the trouble & any concerns this has caused, Gabriel. I can confirm we’re currently investigating the increased error rates and latencies. Feel free to refer to the AWS Health Dashboard to view further,’ the reply tweet reads.
Companies that use AWS took to Twitter to share their site was down
Hundreds of tweets from companies are appearing on Twitter – all citing AWS for their services being down
A similar out hit AWS in 2021 – but this incident lasted for eight hours and disrupted Amazon’s shipping operations just weeks before Christmas.
The December outage shut down communications between the e-commerce giant and the fleet of thousands of drivers it relies on, preventing drivers from getting route assignments or packages.
Issues hit the app Amazon uses to communicate with the network of independent contractors who carry out much of its last-mile shipping, leaving vans that were supposed to be on the road idle, sources told Bloomberg.
Amazon Web Services was formerly run by Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO in July.
The cloud-service operation is a huge profit center for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research – a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined.