Amazon Web Services Restored After Outage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a rare outage on Wednesday, that impacted many websites and other parts of the Internet.

The outage was widespread, and according to the Downdetector.com, reports of problems first began to reported at 1.30pm on Wednesday, and lasted for hours until peaking at 7pm.

However reports continued through the night and into Thursday morning, although Amazon said that it had restored services at 4:18am ET on Thursday morning.

Amazon outage

“We have restored all traffic to Kinesis Data Streams via all endpoints and it is now operating normally. We have also resolved the error rates invoking CloudWatch APIs,” reads an update on the AWS Service Health Dashboard.

“We continue to work towards full recovery for IoT SiteWise and details of the service status is below. All other services are operating normally,” it added. “We have identified the root cause of the Kinesis Data Streams event, and have completed immediate actions to prevent recurrence.”

Amazon Kinesis is a part of AWS’ cloud service that collects, processes and analyses real-time data and offers insights.

But Amazon did not reveal what had caused the outage.

Any outage of AWS is likely to have a significant impact, as Amazon Web Services is one of the most widely-used cloud computing services in the world.

AWS outages have happened before on multiple occansions, and experts point out that these service interruptions demonstrate the need for organisations to build in redundancies into their operations.