Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage on December 7 that knocked out a number of websites and services, including Coinbase, Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon’s own e-commerce site.
AWS’ website notified users that it was experiencing issues with a number of APIs and the AWS Management Console. Problems were confined to AWS’ main US-East-1 region, which is hosted in North Virginia, so many customers may not have experienced issues.
Amazon first commented on the incident at 9.37am PST through its AWS Service Health Dashboard, stating: “We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-East-1 Region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.”
By 4:35pm PST, all issues affecting the company’s EC2 service had been resolved, although other services are still continuing to suffer problems at the time of publication.
“With the network device issues resolved, we are now working towards recovery of any impaired services. We will provide additional updates for impaired services within the appropriate entry in the Service Health Dashboard.”
According to analytics firm Kentik, Netflix, which runs almost all of its infrastructure through AWS, lost 26% of its traffic on December 7. Other services that reported issues included iRobot, Ticketmaster, and Robinhood.
The outage affected Amazon’s internal services in a number of ways too. Amazon spokesman Richard Rocha confirmed the company’s warehouse operations experienced problems, whilst sellers on Amazon’s e-commerce site reported they were unable to access their pages to manage customer orders.
Considering this is Amazon’s peak season, the outage comes at an inconvenient time for the company’s retail operations as pressure to deliver in time for Christmas mounts.
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