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Amazon down - latest updates: Company says it does not have ‘ETA for full recovery’

Amazon down - latest updates: Company says it does not have ‘ETA for full recovery’

Amazon Web Services, the shopping giant’s internet infrastructure arm, is experiencing technical issues that are echoing across much of the rest of the internet.

A variety of websites and services were hit by problems apparently because of issues with the underlying technology, which is provided by Amazon Web Services or AWS.

That included many of the world’s biggest apps and services, from Disney Plus and Tinder to Coinbase. Games were also hit, with PUBG and League of Legends seeming to go down.

It also hit other Amazon-owned services, including the Alexa voice assistant, the Kindle, Amazon Music and its Ring security cameras.

But it did not appear to be a problem in all locations. Amazon said the problems were in the “US-EAST-1” which is hosted in Virginia and serves areas nearby, meaning that people reliant on other parts of the AWS network may still be able to load services, though it might perform more slowly than usual.

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Key Points

Amazon Web Services are still settling

08:22 , Adam Smith

With the United Kingdom and Europe wakling up, the main outages have been restored but Amazon Web Services remain slow.

"With the network device issues resolved, we are now working towards recovery of any impaired services", the company wrote on its status page.

It also said that while it has seem some issues, they have decreased since the error first started yesterday evening.

Amazon blamed AWS outage on high traffic from unknown source, says report

08:16 , Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

The primary reason behind the outage is believed to be a sudden increase in traffic that caused congestion across multiple network devices in Northern Virginia.

According to reports, the company had initially pegged the “root cause” of the outage on “a problem with several network devices within the internal AWS network”.

“...these devices are receiving more traffic than they are able to process, which is leading to elevated latency and packet loss for the traffic traversing them,” read screenshots of an internal AWS communique from Tuesday morning obtained by Insider.

Smart device users register anger on social media

07:56 , Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

The outage left thousands of people in the US without working fridges, Roomba and doorbells.

Livid customers took to social media to register their anger with the company.

The outage dampened the Christmas spirit for some.

Amazon says company working to fix impaired services

06:10 , Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

The company is the latest post on the AWS status page said they are now working to fix any impaired services.

“With the network device issues resolved, we are now working towards recovery of any impaired services. We will provide additional updates for impaired services within the appropriate entry in the Service Health Dashboard,” it said.

Amazon suffered 27 outages in 12 months

04:59 , Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

In the past 12 months, users have experienced 27 outages on Amazon, according to a web tool reviewing website ToolTester.

Amazon was also among the top 20 websites to face the most amount of outages in the last 12 months in the United States.

Earlier in July, over 38,000 customers were affected due to a disruption on amazon’s online store service, that lasted for almost two hours.

The other Amazon outages, as covered by The Independent

04:00 , Josh Marcus

The massive Amazon outage impacting businesses across the country isn’t the first such problem at the retail tech giant. It’s not even their first major service outage this year.

Here’s how The Independent has covered previous Amazon outages.

Massive Amazon Web Services outages hits companies across internet

Amazon ‘missed out on $34m in sales during internet outage’

Delta, Southwest Airlines faced server issues due to outage

03:57 , Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

People trying to book flight tickets or change trips with Delta Air Lines had trouble connecting to the airline.

“Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines,” said spokesperson Morgan Durrant, encouraging customers to use its website or mobile app instead.

Similarly, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected.

Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.

One part of Amazon that’s not suffering? Its stock price

03:33 , Josh Marcus

The Amazon Web Services outage may be hitting companies across the country, but Amazon’s stock price sure hasn’t been affected.

As of Tuesday evening, shares were up nearly 3 per cent.

A screen shot of Amazon’s stock price on 7 December, 2021. (Screengrab of Google)
A screen shot of Amazon’s stock price on 7 December, 2021. (Screengrab of Google)

Amazon Web Services outage Meme Report, Volume II

03:03 , Josh Marcus

As important as The Independent’s award-winning journalism is to understanding the news, there are, of course, the memes to help round things out.

Here are the latest jokes on Twitter about the Amazon Web Services outage that you need to know:

ICYMI: Amazon hit by technical problems, causing issues across internet

02:33 , Josh Marcus

Amazon Web Services, the shopping giant’s internet infrastructure arm, is experiencing technical issues that are echoing across much of the rest of the internet.

A variety of websites and services were hit by problems apparently because of issues with the underlying technology, which is provided by Amazon Web Services or AWS.

That included many of the world’s biggest apps and services, from Disney Plus and Tinder to Coinbase. Games were also hit, with PUBG and League of Legends seeming to go down.The Independent’s Andrew Griffin has full the story.

Amazon hit by major technical issues

Pizzagate truther trolls Amazon for AWS outage

02:08 , Josh Marcus

You thought web servers were apolitical? Wrong!

Conservative provocateur Jack Posobiec, best known for promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, trolled Amazon on Tuesday for its AWS outages, noting that conservative video-sharing site Rumble was still up and running.

“Rumble Video is functioning at 100% while Amazon Web Services is suffering a major outage,” he wrote on Tuesday. “Sorry, Bezos bros!”

Amazon says it has found ‘root cause’ of some of its outages

01:43 , Josh Marcus

It’s not exactly “Mission Accomplished,” but it’s a start.

Amazon announced it has “identified the root cause” and is “continuing to work towards resolution” of an issue at one of its Northern Virginia Amazon Web Services facilities, according to the official AWS Service Health Dashboard, as AWS outages hit companies across the country.

“Many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services,” the company added.

Amazon opens new ‘top secret’ AWS region for classified US government missions

01:18 , Josh Marcus

There’s some other Amazon news that isn’t making as many headlines.

The company announced yesterday it is planning to open a new “top secret” region of its Amazon Web Services offerings to the US government.“AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level,” the company wrote on its site on Monday. “With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.”

AWS outage hits Amazon close to home: at delivery warehouses

00:53 , Josh Marcus

It’s not just Amazon customers who are experiencing AWS outages.

The company’s own delivery drivers have reported problems with the Flex app, used for tracking delivery operations, and another app the company uses for tracking employee time.

As a result, drivers across the country have been unable to log in and deliver Amazon boxes in states ranging from Florida to Minnesota, Motherboard reported.

Hundreds of Amazon employees convene for ‘war’ council as AWS outage rages

00:28 , Josh Marcus

Hundreds of Amazon employees convened on a massive conference call to diagnose the major Amazon Web Services outage that struck today, as problems for many AWS customers continuing through the evening.

One AWS manager described the mood as “the fog of war” to Business Insider.

Still no explanation for what caused AWS outage across country

00:13 , Josh Marcus

Nearly a day on, Amazon still hasn’t released a full explanation of what is causing the outage across parts of its Amazon Web Services offering used by major companies.

So far, company reps have offered a barebones statement, noting simply that “there is an AWS service event in the US-East Region (Virginia) affecting Amazon Operations and other customers with resources running from this region. The AWS is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

AWS outage impacts popular online learning software Canvas

Tuesday 7 December 2021 23:45 , Josh Marcus

The Amazon Web Services outage has impacted Canvas, a popular virtual learning software used by many in mixed in-person/online classrooms during the pandemic, right in time for finals season at many universities.

“Our AWS friends are reporting incremental recovery, but we’re not there yet,” Instructure, the company that makes Canvas, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

Outages aren’t the only thing troubling Amazon at the moment

Tuesday 7 December 2021 23:25 , Josh Marcus

In addition to a worrying AWS outage, Amazon is facing another potential union vote at one of its warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama, a facility which made headlines internationally earlier this year amid a failed union drive.

Last week, James Moore had this in-depth look at the situation for Independent Premium.

Amazon’s nose bloodied by US union as battle of Bessemer set for rematch

Toyota dealer services goes down and Netflix traffic drops

Tuesday 7 December 2021 23:05 , Josh Marcus

Toyota spokesperson Scott Vazin said the company’s US East Region for dealer services went down. The company has apps that process dealer warranty claims and other services, over 20 of which were affected.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm, said he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. He said a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved.

“More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,” he said. “This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen.”

Kentik saw a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage, Madory said.

It was unclear how, or whether, the outage was affecting the federal government. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email response to questions that it was working with Amazon “to understand any potential impacts this outage may have for federal agencies or other partners”.

AWS may be down, but memes and karaoke (?) continue online

Tuesday 7 December 2021 22:45 , Josh Marcus

Amazon’s flagship cloud computing service AWS may be experiencing difficulty at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped social media users from finding moments for levity, from making memes about abandoned Amazon packages, to Amazon drivers singing karaoke.

Here are some of the best jokes below, ranging from Bo Burnham references to “porch pirates”:

Delta Airlines struggle amid AWS outage

Tuesday 7 December 2021 22:30 , AP news wire

Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines were having trouble connecting to the airline. “Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines,” said spokesperson Morgan Durrant. The airline apologized and encouraged customers to use its website or mobile app instead.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. Customers were still reporting outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reports, more than three hours after they started. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.

Also according to DownDetector, people trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ have reported issues. The McDonald’s app was also down. But the airlines American, United, Alaska and JetBlue were unaffected.

Amazon outage hampers popular online video games

Tuesday 7 December 2021 22:15 , Josh Marcus

In addition to causing problems for customers of companies like Netflix and Ticketmaster, the ongoing Amazon Web Services outage has impacted players of popular video games.

Titles like Destiny 2, League of Legends, Valorant, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Dead by Daylight have all reported issues with the online components of their gameplay, according to games news site Kotaku.

“We’re aware of a problem causing login attempts to fail and are working on a fix,” a notice on the League of Legends support site reads.

Amazon faces losing up to £1.4bn from UK shoppers over Visa ban

Tuesday 7 December 2021 21:55 , Gemma Francis

Amazon faces losing nearly £1.4bn from UK shoppers when it blocks payments made using Visa credit cards in Britain from January 2022.

A poll of 2,000 adults found that 13 per cent of Amazon’s 48 million UK customers - equivalent to 6.15 million people - intend to either slash the amount of their purchases, or totally quit buying from the corporation.

As Amazon’s total UK revenues in 2020 were £20.63bn, the loss of this part of its British customer revenues could cause the firm to lose £1.356bn in purchases.

Data suggests Visa credit card transactions last year accounted for around £1.4bn of the firm’s net sales in the UK.

It also emerged that one-third of those polled have been left with “negative” feelings against the firm for stopping Visa payments from 19 January 2022.

Read more:

Amazon faces losing up to £1.4 billion from UK shoppers over Visa ban

Amazon worker shares dystopian gameboard which monitors how hard staff are working

Tuesday 7 December 2021 21:35 , Gustaf Kilander

A TikTok user shared what appeared to be a screen turning Amazon warehouse work into a kind of game.

The video posted by @chutuo, which has garnered almost two million views, shows what seems to be a screen in an Amazon warehouse listing possible “achievements”.

Other items on the list include “punctual” and “picking up speed”. The item entitled “make history” urges workers to pick up one million products.

In a separate video posted on Sunday, TikTok user @couryeo wrote that working at Amazon was “the worst job I’ve ever had”. The TikToker said she was “overworked” and “underpaid”. She added that she was “treated like a machine” and that there was “no socializing at all”.

“Basically a prison [in my opinion],” she wrote.

Read more:

Amazon worker shares dystopian gameboard which monitors how hard staff are working

Adele fans forced to wait to buy concert tickets as Ticketmaster goes down

Tuesday 7 December 2021 21:10 , Gustaf Kilander

Adele fans have been forced to wait to buy tickets for her tour after the Ticketmaster website went down amid the AWS chaos.

Other sites, such as Coinbase, Robinhood, and Netflix, also experienced problems.

“Due to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage impacting companies globally, all Adele Verified Fan Presales scheduled for today have been moved to tomorrow to ensure a better experience. Fans will receive an email with updated info on their new presale time,” Ticketmaster tweeted on Tuesday.

Adele released her album 30 in November and will hit the road in July 2022, five years after finishing her last world tour, Bloomberg reported.

AWS say they ‘continue to experience increased error rates’

Tuesday 7 December 2021 20:54 , Gustaf Kilander

Amazon Web Services said in an update that they “continue to experience increased” error rates in application programming interfaces – connections between computers and between computer programmes – in the eastern US.

“We continue to work toward mitigation and are actively working on a number of different mitigation and resolution actions. While we have observed some early signs of recovery, we do not have an ETA for full recovery,” the company said.

“For customers experiencing issues signing-in to the AWS Management Console in US-EAST-1, we recommend retrying using a separate Management Console endpoint,” they added.

The company also said that some users outside the eastern region may be unable to log in to their service.

Outage hits Amazon during busy season as some workers celebrate

Tuesday 7 December 2021 20:41 , Gustaf Kilander

The Facebook group “Amazon Delivery Driver Venting and Troubleshooting Group” has almost 9,000 members.

“I’m not working today, but [my warehouse in Idaho] is eating s**t,” one person wrote in the group .

A post celebrating the outage had garnered more than 200 comments.

“Looks like we’re getting paid to sit on the clock, works for me,” another person wrote.

The app used by Amazon delivery drivers to determine their routes is called Flex and while outages do occur, they’re usually short and doesn’t last for hours as happened on Tuesday, Motherboard reported.

As people order gifts for the holidays, the outage has hit Amazon in the middle of one of their busy periods.

Workers report outages across US and Canada

Tuesday 7 December 2021 20:26 , Gustaf Kilander

Dozens of people have said on the subreddit FASCAmazon, a page used by workers at Amazon’s fulfilment centres and delivery stations, that they have been able to work for hours due to the outage.

Issues have been reported in Texas, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and Ontario, including other locations, according to Motherboard.

“We’ve just been chilling on the clock for almost 2 hours cause the network has been down lmaooo. Guess somebody didn’t like the fact Amazon is making us work Christmas/Christmas eve,” one Reddit user wrote.

“The warehouse never been so quiet it’s eerie,” another wrote.

“I’m loving just sitting here on my phone,” a third posted. “They can only tell us to make sure our area is clean so many times.”

Hundreds of Amazon workers share tales of chaos on social media

Tuesday 7 December 2021 20:11 , Gustaf Kilander

Hundreds of Amazon employees have said that the company’s delivery operation is in disarray as applications used by the workers have been unusable.

Both the Flex app, used for deliveries, and the Dolphin app, used for time tracking and other uses, have been affected.

The owner of an Amazon delivery company in Florida told Motherboard that “AWS servers are down, and only about 50 % of my people can deliver. Most cannot login”.

Hundreds of Amazon staff members have posted about the issues at the company on social media.

“I am making more money than Jeff Bezos in this moment. Right now everything is down worldwide and I am still getting paid double overtime. Amazon is on standstill so I’m sure this second alone he is losing $$$$$,” a user wrote on the subreddit called FASCAmazon, a page for workers at Amazon’s fulfilment centres and delivery stations.

AWS: Problems caused by ‘impairment of several network devices'

Tuesday 7 December 2021 19:51 , Gustaf Kilander

Amazon Web Services said in a status update that they are “seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region”.

An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programmes.

The impacted services include EC2, Connect, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena, Timestream, Chime, as well as “other AWS Services”, according to the company.

They said the cause of the problem is an “impairment of several network devices” on the US east coast.

AWS added that they are “pursuing multiple mitigation paths in parallel, and have seen some signs of recovery, but we do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time”.

They added that “root logins for consoles in all AWS regions are affected by this issue”.

Third Amazon outage of 2021

Tuesday 7 December 2021 19:34 , Gustaf Kilander

Amazon has said that not all parts of the world have been affected by the outage, adding that the area that has been hit the hardest is the eastern coast of the US.

Users of the Amazon shopping site have reported slow loading times, but many have still been able to make purchases.

Services like Ring surveillance cameras, Chime – an app for mobile banking, and robot vacuum iRobot have all reported having problems.

This is the third time an outage hits Amazon this year, the BBC reported. Users experienced a short outage in June when services like Prime Video and Amazon Alexa stopped working. The outage also affected Shopify, PayPal, and CNN.

Outage brings down internal Amazon tools

Tuesday 7 December 2021 19:15 , Gustaf Kilander

The outage has also taken down tools used internally at Amazon.

Employees, both in warehouses and those delivering packages and driving for Amazon’s Flex service, have reported that the Flex app or the AtoZ app are unusable, making staff members unable to scan packages and get access to delivery routes, CNBC reported.

Sellers on Amazon have said that they can’t use Seller Central, the internal site used to handle orders from customers.

Outage reports decrease as company reports ‘signs of recovery'

Tuesday 7 December 2021 19:00 , Gustaf Kilander

Shortly after 11am on Tuesday, AWS saw more than 11,000 reports of outages, a figure that had decreased to below 5,000 reports after 1pm, according to Down Detector.

Just before noon, almost 27,000 outage reports were submitted concerning Amazon. Around 1.30pm, that number had decreased to just over 8,000 reports.

AWS has said that they are seeing “signs of recovery”.

AWS: ‘We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time'

Tuesday 7 December 2021 18:45 , Gustaf Kilander

In an update on the service health dashboard for Amazon Web Services, the company said that while they have identified the “root cause of the issue causing service API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region and are starting to see some signs recovery,” they still “do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time”.

Robinhood, Instacart, Ring affected by AWS outage

Tuesday 7 December 2021 18:30 , Gustaf Kilander

According to Down Detector, some of the services affected by the Amazon outage include:

  • Amazon

  • Amazon Prime Music

  • League of Legends

  • Ring

  • Disney+

  • Amazon Alexa

  • Prime Video

  • Instacart

  • Venmo

  • Robinhood

Amazon says outage is affecting ‘monitoring and incident response’

Tuesday 7 December 2021 18:15 , Gustaf Kilander

On the status update webpage for Amazon Web Services, the company says the outage is “affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates”.

According to the status page, the issue appears to remain at Amazon facilities in Northern Virginia.

Amazon and web services hit by technical issues

Tuesday 7 December 2021 17:58 , Andrew Griffin

Amazon said that it had found the “root cause and we are actively working towards recovery”, though it gave no indication of how long that might take.

Amazon Web Services provide the technology that powers much of the internet. It sells those services to other unrelated companies, meaning that any issues with AWS can quickly take down other, apparently unconnected, parts of the web.

Amazon hit by major technical issues