Major outage hits Amazon Web Services; many sites affected

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, limiting service at many key and popular sites.

The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.

Amazon said in a post an hour after the outage began that it had identified the root cause and was “actively working towards recovery.” It did not disclose more about the cause.

The outage also affected Amazon’s ability to provide updates, it said.

The outage began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm… “AWS is the biggest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts to many popular websites and other internet services,” he said.

Madory said he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. He said a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved. “More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,” he said. “This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity, but are very impactful when they happen.”

Kentik was seeing a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage, Madory said. According to Down Detector, a clearinghouse for user reports on outages, Delta and Southwest have been affected, but not American, United, Alaska or JetBlue.

People trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ have reported issues. The McDonald’s app is also down.