AWS outage takes down large portions of the internet

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(Image credit: Mike Moore)

Services around the globe have been affected by a major cloud computing outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon's cloud computing unit experienced a multi-hour outage that affected many other sites and services on Wednesday. As reported by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson explained in an email that only one of its 23 geographic AWS regions (US-East-1) was experiencing issues at the time. However, the outage was significant enough to take out a large number of other sites and online services that rely on the company's cloud computing arm.

Among the list of apps, services and websites affected by the outage were the likes of 1Password, Coinbase, Flickr, Glassdoor, Roku, Vonage, Autodesk and others. However, major AWS customers Apple, Slack and Netflix did not appear to be affected.

AWS outage

On Amazon's end, the outage impacted many AWS services including ACM, Amplify Console, AppStream2, AppSync, Athena, Batch, CodeArtifact, CodeGuru Profiler, CodeGuru Reviewer, CloudFormation, CloudMap, CloudTrail, Connect, Comprehend, DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, EventBridge, GuardDuty, IoT Services, Lambda, LEX, Macie, Managed Blockchain, Marketplace, MediaLive, MediaConvert, Personalize, RDS Performance Insights, Rekognition, SageMaker, and Workspaces.

In an update to its AWS Service Health Dashboard, the cloud computing giant explained that the issue affecting its Kinesis Data Streams API and other dependent services has been fixed though it is not yet taking the full traffic load, saying:

“We’d like to provide an update on the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API, and other dependent services, within the US-EAST-1 Region. We have now fully mitigated the impact to the subsystem within Kinesis that is responsible for the processing of incoming requests and are no longer seeing increased error rates or latencies. However, we are not yet taking the full traffic load and are working to relax request throttles on the service. Over the next few hours we expect to relax these throttles to previous levels. We expect customers to begin seeing recovery as these throttles are relaxed over this timeframe.”

Sites and services that depend on AWS should be operating normally now and thankfully the outage didn't occur a few days later on Black Friday as that would have been quite detrimental to online retail sites on what is expected to be one of the biggest shopping days of this year.

Via The Verge

Anthony Spadafora

After working with the TechRadar Pro team for the last several years, Anthony is now the security and networking editor at Tom’s Guide where he covers everything from data breaches and ransomware gangs to the best way to cover your whole home or business with Wi-Fi. When not writing, you can find him tinkering with PCs and game consoles, managing cables and upgrading his smart home. 

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