The Amazon cloud outage was a frightening experience for millions of Americans who rely on virtual services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon’s e-Commerce platform.
What caused the Amazon cloud outage?
As reported by Reuters, a wide range of online stores, websites and apps were either inaccessible or reported errors on Tuesday afternoon, at approximately 16:40 CAT.
At the time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported on its status dashboard that while many services had been recovered, full recovery had not yet been achieved, with more than 24 000 incidents reported by users on Down Detector.
Naturally, the disruption caused panic on social media with many users left dumbfounded by the sudden inability to access their favourite apps.
Is Disney+ down? I can’t seem to be able to connect
— Norberto Ivan Guerra (@Castiel_Uchiha) December 7, 2021
— Jason Melrose (@melrose24) December 8, 2021
Can't deposit money into my Robinhood account because AWS is down… #Bitcoin never goes down.
— Not Financial Advice (@NotFin_Advice) December 7, 2021
Services that were disrupted by the Amazon cloud outage include:
- Netflix (most regions, except Africa)
- Disney+
- Robinhood
- Amazon.com Inc e-Commerce
- Chime banking app
- iRobot
According to Amazon, the cloud outage that cost Netflix more than 26% of its traffic, according to analytics firm Kentik, was tracked down to an application programming interface (API) failure. Somewhere in the integration between AWS cloud servers and the respective apps, a set of protocols were disrupted.
The latest update from AWS’ status dashboard was posted at 19:37 CAT on Tuesday and it stated the following on the outage affecting service in the US-EAST-1 region:
“We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.”
