Amazon Web Services (AWS), the engine that powers many of the internet’s most-trafficked websites and apps, appears to be experiencing a widespread outage that is bringing down several popular services.
Amazon, Disney+, and Venmo are all being affected by the outage, and are showing error messages when users attempt to visit their websites. Amazon appears to be aware of the issue and admitted to seeing “Increased Error Rates” in the AWS Management Console. We reached out to Amazon, and the company pointed us to its AWS Service Health Dashboard. An update posted at 8:26 a.m. PT reads:
“We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery. This issue is affecting the global console landing page, which is also hosted in US-EAST-1.
Amazon further revealed the issue to be caused by an “impairment of several network devices.” In a 2:47 p.m. PT update, the company claims to have “mitigated the underlying issue” that caused network devices to be faulty. Server health is improving, according to Amazon, which is now conducting a service-by-service recovery. The company disabled Event Deliveries for Amazon EventBridge in US-EAST-1 as it works for a full recovery for all affected AWS customers. There is still no timeline on when your favorite sites will be fully operational again.
Additional status updates cite problems with Amazon Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and AWS Support Center in the US-EAST-1 region. A notice at the top of Amazon’s dashboard warns that trouble with monitoring and “incident response tooling” is preventing the company from providing timely updates.
It’s unclear how many services rely on the US-EAST-1 cloud region, but at the moment, DownDetector, an online tool that displays a heat map of real-time outages, shows Amazon experiencing issues throughout the United States and in other countries around the world. According to the site, tens of thousands of reports have been filed.
DownDetector shows dozens of services experiencing a spike in outages, most notably: Tinder, Roku, Coinbase, and Ring security cameras, as well as the games League of Legends, Valorant, and PUBG. This is only a small sample in a large list of services hit by the outage.
Update 9 p.m. ET: Whatever caused the outage appears to have been resolved. (Gizmodo was unable to upload images on our articles until about 10 minutes before this update.) Amazon says it is working to restore all services, so we can likely all forget this ever happened by morning.