AWS Outage is Causing Problems for Alexa, Video Games, IMDb, and Delivery Apps

What's going on with the AWS outage that happened today? Before we get into it, let's talk about the history of issues happening in the us-east-1 region. I feel as if the issues have been occurring frequently. In September, the us-east-1 region experienced EC2 instance troubles due to resource contention issues. In November 2020, the same region encountered problems after the Kinesis service experienced API difficulties, causing a number of AWS products to fail. Technical issues can always happen but thanks to the engineers at AWS, the issues are solved in timely manner. After reading a few articles, I decided to write a blog post and share the news in summarized form!

According to the firm, Amazon Web Services experienced a massive outage today, reducing service at several vital and popular sites. Many governments, institutions, and businesses, including The Associated Press, use the company's cloud computing services. Amazon subsidiaries such as IMDb went down as well as games, such as Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Valorant, Clash of Clans, and others. It is reported that the issue began around 10:45AM EST.

In a post an hour after the outage occurred, Amazon stated that it had found the main cause and was "actively working toward recovery." It didn't say anything else about the cause. Amazon later updated the dashboard, stating that the company was "beginning to see some signs of recovery." There is currently no timetable for full recovery.

The cloud company has acknowledged the outage, saying: "We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery. This issue is affecting the global console landing page, which is also hosted in US-EAST-1. Customers may be able to access region-specific consoles going to https://console.aws.amazon.com/. So, to access the US-WEST-2 console, try https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/"

On its updated status page, it said that Amazon Connect (N. Virginia) has degraded contact handling, that Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud have increased API error rates, and the AWS Management Console and Support Center have increased error rates.

Among the major web-based services hit by the outage, Kentik was witnessing a 26 percent decline in traffic to Netflix, according to Madory. Delta and Southwest have been affected, but not American, United, Alaska, or JetBlue, according to Down Detector, a clearinghouse for user information on outages.

People who attempted to utilize Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ reported problems. The McDonald's app was also unavailable.

You can read the official statement from AWS be clicking here.