Amazon's cloud-service network experienced a massive outage on Tuesday, interrupting access to many popular websites. Many governments, universities and companies, including The
Associated Press, use the service for remote computing. The outage knocked out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood, a wide range of apps and Amazon.com Inc's e-commerce website.
Amazon Web Services stated it has "mitigated" the main issue responsible for the outage in a post on the AWS status page, about five hours after numerous companies and other
organisations began reporting issues with the service.
"Many services have already been restored," Amazon stated on its status dashboard, "and we are working toward full recovery across services."
According to their social media pages, Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime, and robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot, all of which use Amazon Web Services (AWS),
all reported disruptions. Reports said that the outage mainly affected Amazon online services in the eastern United States.
Netflix, which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, reportedly lost 26% of its traffic, according to Doug Madory, head of internet intelligence at Kentik.
Reason of outage
The outage, according to Amazon, was caused by network devices and was linked to an API or application programming interface, which is a set of protocols for creating and integrating
application software.
According to Madory, the "outage was not caused by anything malicious." He believes that a recent cluster of outages at major website hosting providers demonstrates how the
networking sector has developed.
"These disruptions are becoming much more the result of automation and centralization of administration," he said. "As a result of the operational complexity, this leads
to outages that are difficult to completely avoid and have a significant impact when they occur."
According to the web tool review website ToolTester, Amazon has had 27 outages related to its services in the last 12 months.