Amazon Prime, Ring Services In US Impacted By AWS Outage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has suffered an outage that has impacted some big name services from the e-commerce giant.

The AWS outage saw services such as Prime Video, the Amazon e-commerce website, and other applications that use AWS such as Ring security cameras and doorbells downed for thousands of users in the United States on Tuesday.

According to the Downdetector UK website, users began complaining of AWS outages just after 3.30pm on Tuesday afternoon. Problems are still ongoing as of 7pm Tuesday.

AWS Outage

The good news for British users is this problem seems to be limited to the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

Amazon offered up an explanation on its AWS Health Dashboardon on Tuesday evening, but was unable to provide an time when the issue would be fixed.

It identified the outage was likely due to issues with an application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

“We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region,” it said. “This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates.”

“We have identified root cause of the issue causing service API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region, and are starting to see some signs of recovery,” it added. “We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time.”

Reuters reported that over 24,000 users had reported a problem on the Downdetector US website.

A quick check by Silicon UK at 7pm GMT on Tuesday found the cluster of problems reports centred around New York and Washington, but reaching as far a field as Dallas and Houston in Texas.

Other services such as Amazon’s Ring security cameras, the mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages.

Ring said it was aware of the issue and working to resolve it.

Cloud Outages

Outages to cloud services do happen once in a while.

In November 2020 Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a rare outage, that impacted many websites and other parts of the Internet.

Then in June this year, websites belonging the UK Government, Amazon, CNN, Bloomberg, Financial Times offline were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based content delivery network provider Fastly, a smaller rival of AWS.

In July, Amazon again experienced a disruption in its online stores service, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected more than 38,000 users, Reuters reported.

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

UPDATE: After 6 to seven hours of outages, AWS said “many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services”.

That said, services like SSO, Connect, API Gateway, ECS/Fargate, and EventBridge were still experiencing impact. Engineers are actively working on resolving impact to these services, said AWS.

It then provided the following update 4:35 PM PST (12.35am GMT)

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