Amazon Cloud Services Back Online After Widespread Outage
Amazon.com has announced that the cloud services provided by its subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), have been reinstated following a major outage on Tuesday that impacted several websites, including those of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Boston Globe.
Several hours after Downdetector.com began showing reports of outages, Amazon said, “the issue has been resolved and all AWS services are operating normally.”
Tuesday’s impact on companies ranging from transportation to financial services underscores the deployment of Amazon’s younger Lambda service and the extent to which many of its cloud services are important to businesses in the Internet age.
According to a study last year by cloud company Datadog, more than half of organizations operating in the cloud use Lambda or competing services known as “serverless” technology.
Downdetector outage reports fell below 700 after surpassing 12,000 earlier in the day.
The outage appeared smaller in time and scope than the one the company suffered in 2017 at its data hosting service known as Amazon S3, which represents the bread and butter of its cloud business.
The outage appeared to extend to AWS’s own website, which describes the disruption, which failed to load at one point on Tuesday, Reuters witnesses saw.
“We quickly traced the root cause to an issue in the AWS Lambda capacity management subsystem that was causing errors directly to customers and indirectly through the use of other AWS services,” Amazon said.
AWS Lambda is a service that allows customers to run computer programs without having to manage the underlying servers.
The outage also affected the services of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system, Southwest Airlines, Verge and AP for Students.
Twitter users expressed their frustration at the outage, with one user saying: “I don’t know, Alexa won’t tell me because #AWS and her services are down!”
Delta Air Lines also said its website experienced problems, but did not say whether it was due to the AWS outage. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
United Airlines said it had little impact on its operations, adding that “we are not affected.”
According to Downdetector, other Amazon services, such as Amazon Music and Alexa, were also affected.
Amazon’s last major outage was in December 2021, when outages in its cloud services temporarily knocked out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood and Amazon’s e-commerce sites before Christmas.
Amazon shares were largely unchanged in aftermarket trading on Tuesday.
