Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s internet infrastructure service that is the backbone of many websites and apps, has been experiencing a multi-hour outage that is affecting a large portion of the internet. And as of 5:25PM ET on Wednesday, a full recovery might still be a few hours away, according to Amazon.
“We continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said in a 3:15PM ET statement on its AWS Service Health Dashboard. “We also continue to see an improvement in error rates for Kinesis and several affected services, but expect full recovery to still take up to a few hours.” In a 5:25PM ET update to the dashboard, the company reiterated that timeline. At 7:42PM ET, the company said that it was “observing steady signs of recovery” of the problem affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region.
In an email to The Verge, Amazon noted that the issues are only affecting one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. But the problem has been significant enough to take out a large number of internet services.
Many apps, services, and websites have posted on Twitter about how the AWS outage is affecting them, including 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post, and WNYC. Downdetector.com has also shown spikes in user reports of problems with many Amazon services throughout the day.
AWS is one of the most widely-used cloud computing services in the world, so any issues can have major ripple effects for other web services and apps, as evidenced by the number of companies affected by today’s outage. My colleague Russell Brandom has a helpful video explaining how AWS works:
Update November 25th, 7:58PM ET: Added update from the AWS Service Health Dashboard.