Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Numerous Popular Websites
A connectivity issue in AWS's US-West-2 region caused widespread service interruptions for hours on Friday morning.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage on Friday morning, disrupting access to a significant number of popular websites and online services. The problems began around 6:40 a.m. Eastern Time, with users reporting difficulties accessing services such as Apple Pay, DoorDash, Reddit, and Hulu, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
AWS stated that the disruption was caused by connectivity problems affecting multiple services within its US-West-2 region, located in Oregon. The company later identified seven impacted services, including AWS Direct Connect, Global Accelerator, Internet Connectivity, IoT Core, Amazon API Gateway, Elastic Compute Cloud, and Elastic Container Service.
A regional failure within AWS can have cascading effects on various websites and applications that depend on Amazon's cloud infrastructure. During the outage, companies utilizing AWS services issued apologies to their customers via social media for the interruptions. Users also expressed frustration as their usual online platforms became unavailable.
Users of PlayStation reported issues as well, with some being disconnected from games. AWS classified the incident as an "impacted" event, indicating that customers were experiencing service problems. However, the company reported no indication of customer data loss or failure within Amazon's broader global network.
AWS confirmed that the connectivity issues were resolved shortly after 9 a.m. Eastern Time.