Amazon cloud outage causes chaos

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many 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.” The issue primarily affected its services in the Eastern U.S., it said. It did not disclose any additional details about the cause.

Amazon later updated the dashboard to note that the company was “starting to see some signs of recovery. We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time.”

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

Problems 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.

Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines were having trouble connecting to the airline.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. Customers were still reporting outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse

for user outage reports, hours after they started. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.

Also according to DownDetector, people trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku and Disney+ reported they were having problems. The McDonald’s app was also down. But the airlines American, United, Alaska and JetBlue were unaffected.

Toyota spokesperson Scott Vazin said the company’s U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. The company has apps that process dealer warranty claims and other services, over 20 of which were affected.

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 saw a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage, Madory said.

It was unclear how, or whether, the outage was affecting the federal government. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email response to questions that it was working with Amazon “to understand any potential impacts this outage may have for federal agencies or other partners.”

Smartsheet, which provides collaboration software, noted on its status page that its service was unavailable “due to an outage in AWS.” Asana, which offers project management services, noted that some of its offerings were unavailable because of the AWS outage.

Amazon’s own Ring home security business noted on its website that its app was having problems saving changes made by customers, as well as live views from its cameras failing to connect to the app. Ring spokeswoman Emma Daniels said the services’ problems were related to the AWS problems.

A year ago, AWS experienced a major outage that took down large swaths of the web, including Ring, iRobot and The Washington Post. In a lengthy post-mortem at the time, AWS said its giant Northern Virginia data center began to fail after the company started to make “a relatively small addition of capacity” to the system. But because of “an operating system configuration,” the new capacity set off a series of errors that overwhelmed Amazon’s network of servers.

AWS is the world’s largest provider of cloud-computing services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the web instead of running their own data centers. In 2020, AWS held 40.8% of the worldwide market for infrastructure cloud services, according to market research firm Gartner. It’s closest rival, Microsoft, held 19.7% of the global market.