Major Outage Hits Amazon Web Services

An hourslong outage on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing unit Tuesday left Roomba vacuum cleaners dormant, streaming services blank and delayed buyers from snapping up Adele presale concert tickets.

The Wall Street Journal reports users began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services around 10:45 a.m. EST, according to Downdetector, which tracks website outages. About a half-hour later, the site showed nearly 11,300 reports of outages. The outages appeared to be concentrated in New York, Washington and Chicago, according to Downdetector.

AWS is the largest cloud-computing provider in the U.S. The service allows customers, including many large businesses, to rent computing, storage and network capabilities. Companies and consumers have increasingly come to depend on cloud-computing services as the pandemic has forced them to work from home.

Downdetector showed outages Tuesday for many Amazon services, including streaming service Prime Music, videoconferencing tool Chime and home-security system Ring. Many third-party applications that sit on top of Amazon’s cloud were also receiving outage reports on Downdetector, such as Ticketmaster and streaming services from Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc. Some media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, experienced delayed publishing.

AWS said it began investigating increased error rates and console issues in the US-East-1 region—which is hosted in Northern Virginia and covers cities including Boston, Houston and Chicago—at around 11:20 a.m. EST Tuesday. It said it had identified the root cause of the issue, which was affecting its global console landing page. “We are actively working towards recovery,” Amazon said in an update on its status dashboard.

By 5 p.m., outage reports on Downdetector had dipped below 3,500.

Outages in cloud services aren’t uncommon, but they have become more noticeable as more companies have migrated to these major cloud platforms over the past few years, said Sid Nag, vice president at research firm Gartner Inc. He estimates a major outage happens around once a quarter every year.

The top five players, with Amazon by far in the lead, own around 90% of the cloud infrastructure market, he said.

To technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud, the AWS outage highlights how much Big Tech has warped the internet, which was originally designed as a distributed and decentralized network intended to survive mass disasters such as nuclear attack, reports The Associated Press.

“When we put everything in one place, be it Amazon’s cloud or Facebook’s monolith, we’re violating that fundamental principle,” said Malamud, who developed the internet’s first radio station and later put a vital U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database online. “We saw that when Facebook became the instrument of a massive disinformation campaign, we just saw that today with the Amazon failure.”

Widespread and often lengthy outages resulting from single-point failures appear increasingly common. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including CNN, The New York Times and Britain’s government home page.