Amazon Cloud Outage Cripples Multiple Major Websites and Streaming Applications
Key Takeaways:
- A major outage disrupted Amazon’s cloud services on December 7, 2021.
- The outage disrupted the services of major websites and streamlining applications such as Disney+, Netflix, and Robinhood among others.
- Amazon said that the company is doing everything in its power to resolve the problem.
A huge outage hit Amazon’s cloud services on Dec 7, 2021, disrupting multiple noteworthy websites and streaming services. Streaming services such as Disney+ and Netflix were affected along with Amazon’s own e-commerce site.
Thousands of users across Europe and North America reported the issue as they turned to e-commerce sites for shopping ahead of Christmas.
Amazon said that it was doing everything in its capacity to resolve the issue and make progress. However, the company did not give a clear timeline regarding when the services will be restored again.
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What caused the Amazon Cloud outage?
According to Amazon, the root cause of the massive outage could be associated with its application programming interface (API). The API is a well-structured group of protocols that streamlines application development and integration of software.
The company said that it is experiencing issues with consoles and API across the US-East-1 region. In a report on its service health dashboard, Amazon revealed that it has identified the root of the problem.
Although the services seemed to have partially been restored by late afternoon, the company said that it was working toward full recovery.
More about the outage and how it affected users
More than 24,000 users reported the problem on Downdetector. Downdetector keeps track of such outages by combining status reports from different sources, including outages reported by users on the platform.
The outage has also had a negative impact on Amazon’s delivery options. Amazon’s warehouse operations that run on Amazon Web Services were also affected by the outage. An Amazon driver from Washington state reported that his facility was at a standstill in the first half of Tuesday.
Some of the other services that bore the brunt of the patchy services include Amazon’s Ring security cameras, robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, and a mobile banking application Chime.
A lot of websites were affected by the outage such as Internet Movie Database (IMDb), dating application Tinder, and language learning provider Duolingo. The disruption in Amazon’s services also affected pre-sales of tickets for Adele’s concert in Las Vegas.
According to ToolTester, users have experienced around 27 outages on Amazon over the past year.
