Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it has resolved the network device issues behind a widespread outage that impacted websites and services for universities, governments and companies for hours Tuesday.
The incident at Amazon’s cloud computing network mostly affected the eastern U.S. and Canada, but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation.
Amazon said earlier Tuesday the outage was likely due to issues related to application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software, and said it was working to resolve the issue. But the company has yet to fully explain what exactly went wrong.
On Tuesday night, the company’s service health dashboard said was is in the process of recovering impaired services after resolving the key issues behind the outage. Those services, including the main AWS management console, appeared to return to normal a couple of hours later.
Midday Tuesday, Downdetector — a website that tracks outages — showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon.
This would be the third outage for the company this year.
AWS provides servers, storage, email and a number of other services to these platforms — effectively keeping large parts of the internet running. The outage is impacting user access to a wide variety of platforms.
Amazon’s web services are among the most widely used, including by the Canadian federal government. Some of the major websites that users reported as experiencing outages Tuesday include the popular streaming service Disney+, the messaging platform Slack, the digital wallet service Venmo, the language app Duolingo, and the stock trading service Robinhood. News websites including the Globe and Mail and the Associated Press were also impacted.
Other services, including Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, also shared on social media that they were facing issues.
While the cloud service was down, the internet’s appetite for memes was not. Users quickly took to Twitter to share their unfiltered feelings about the massive outage.
Some looked on the bright side of the outage, framing it as a potential savings opportunity ahead of the holidays.
Others poked fun at the company itself.
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 Inc, a smaller rival of AWS.
In July, Amazon experienced a disruption in its online stores service, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected more than 38,000 users.
Users have experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months on Amazon, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester.
— with files from Reuters, The Associated Press
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