A global outage disrupted Amazon’s cloud services on Tuesday, knocking out streaming sites Netflix and Disney+, financial platform Robinhood and a wide range of apps.
Amazon.com e-commerce website was also affected as consumers shopped ahead of Christmas. Users began reporting issues around 10:40am eastern US time on Tuesday.
Amazon said it was working to resolve the issue and was making progress, but did not give an estimate when services would be fully restored.
“Netflix, which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, appears to have lost 26% of its traffic,” Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik, said.
Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, which all use Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported issues, according to their social media pages.
Data Centre Dynamics, a London-based consultancy, said the outage occurred at the AWS US-East-1 Cloud Region in northern Virginia, near Washington DC, and was affecting sites worldwide.
Earlier Networking Failures
The region had issues with EC2 instances in September and November 2020 after resource contention problems. Earlier this year, a networking failure at Amazon Web Services’ AP-Northeast-1 region in Tokyo caused more than six hours of outages.
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.
“This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” the company said on its status dashboard.
On Tuesday, video games such as Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, Valorant, Clash of Clans, Destiny 2 and Dead by Daylight were affected, among others. The issue began at around 10:45AM ET.
Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon, including its namesake e-commerce website, Prime Video, and other services. The outage tracking website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
- Reuters with additional editing by George Russell
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