Amazon’s cloud services network suffered a significant outage on Tuesday, the company reported, preventing access to many popular sites. The remote computing service is used by a wide variety of governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.
About five hours after multiple companies and other organizations began reporting problems with Amazon Web Services, the company reported in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage. Shortly after, he reported that “many services have already recovered,” but noted that they were still working to fully restore others.
The problem mainly affected Amazon’s web services in the eastern United States, he said. The problems began in the middle of the morning on the east coast of the United States, said Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik Inc., an online intelligence company, affecting Amazon’s own e-commerce operations.
In a statement, Amazon spokesman Richard Rocha confirmed that Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations also experienced problems as a result of the AWS service disruption. Rocha added that the company is “working to solve the problem as soon as possible.”
Customers who tried to book or change flights with Delta Air Lines had trouble contacting the airline. “Delta is working quickly to reestablish our AWS-operated phone lines,” said spokesperson Morgan Durrant. The airline apologized and asked customers to make better use of the website or mobile app.
For its part, Southwest Airlines said it had switched to west coast servers after some airport systems were affected by the outage. Customers continued to report problems at DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outages, more than three hours after they started. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major flight disruptions.
According to DownDetector, people who tried to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney + reported problems. The McDonald’s app wasn’t working either. But American, United, Alaska and JetBlue airlines were not affected. Kentik saw a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, which was among the top web services affected by the flaws.
At the moment it is unknown how, or if, the interruption affected the federal government. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email sent in response to questions that it was working with Amazon “to understand any potential impact this disruption may have on federal agencies or other partners.”
–