Amazon Cloud Outage Hits Websites and Streaming Apps

Amazon Web Services, the shopping giant’s internet infrastructure arm, is experiencing technical issues that are echoing across much of the rest of the internet.

A variety of websites and services were hit by problems apparently because of issues with the underlying technology, which is provided by Amazon Web Services or AWS.

"Many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services," Amazon said on its status dashboard.

Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime, and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, that use Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported issues according to their social media pages.

Trading app Robinhood and Walt Disney's streaming service Disney+ and Netflix were also down, according to Downdetector.com.

"Netflix which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS appears to have lost 26 percent of its traffic," Doug Madory, head of Internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik, said.

Amazon said the outage was related to network devices and linked to application programming interface, or API, which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon, including Prime Video and other services. The outage tracking website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Users began reporting issues around 10:40am ET (9:10pm IST) on Tuesday and the outage might have affected a larger number of users.

Amazon has experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months related to its services, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester.

In June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and the New York Times were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based content delivery network provider Fastly, a smaller rival of AWS.

December 08, 2021