AWS Outage Cripples Parts Of The Internet As Amazon Scrambles To Fix Root Cause
If you're an old fogey who doesn't use cloud storage (like this HotHardware writer), you may not realize how much of the internet depends on the companies that provide those services. Servers owned by large cloud service providers—such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Baidu—are the backbone of the World Wide Web these days, with thousands upon thousands of sites and services utterly dependent on these companies.
As such, if you've suffered an outage of a favorite app or service today, it was probably because Amazon is having troubles at datacenter(s?) in the US-EAST-1 region. Smack at the top of the Amazon Web Services' Service Health Dashboard is a notification that Amazon is "seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 region." Whatever the specific issue is, it's affecting Amazon's ability to actually monitor and fix whatever the problem is too, which is why things are still somewhat buggered across the web.
Reports indicate that the services affected by the today's outage include Roku's media services, Coinbase, dating app Tinder, Disney Plus, and cash transfer apps Venmo and Cash App. Some big game services went offline too, including Valorant, League of Legends (including its Wild Rift spinoff), PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Dead by Daylight, Destiny 2, and others. Furthermore, the whole UPlay service and the Epic Games Stores both went down, as well as Bethesda.net.
In fact, the outage was so serious that at one point, Amazon's own store wasn't working, as you can see in the screen grab above that was captured earlier. Some Amazon services are still having problems too, including Prime Video, Amazon Music, Alexa, Kindle eBooks, and both Chime and Ring security cameras. As we said earlier; if you're having a problem with a web service today, it's probably Amazon's fault.
The error message on Amazon's service health dashboard.
It's surprising that it's already afternoon as we write this and yet the company hasn't completely resolved the issue—whatever it is—but things do seem to be coming back online. For its part, Amazon says it has "identified the root cause" and is "actively working towards recovery," so we suspect it'll be all sewed up here shortly.
