Amazon Web Services outage shuts down large parts of the internet

People using online services like Netflix, Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ experienced issues Tuesday after Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a major outage. The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies.

“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,” AWS said on its Service Health Dashboard. “We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time.”

Downdetector, a clearinghouse for user reports on outages, showed nearly 27,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon at around 11:00 a.m. Tuesday.

Network intelligence firm Kentik reported a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, likely due at least in part to the Amazon Web Services outage. In addition, the outage has appeared to have affected some airlines according to Downdetector, this includes Delta and Southwest. Other airlines, including American and United, appeared to be unaffected.

“AWS is the biggest cloud provider and US-EAST-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts to many popular websites and other internet services,” Kentik Internet Analysis Director Doug Madroy said.

Madroy went on to say he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. Instead, he pointed to a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites as evidence of an evolving networking industry.

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

This is not the first time Amazon has run into outage issues. Web tool reviewing website ToolTester said Amazon users have experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months. In July, Amazon experienced a disruption in its online stores service. The disruption lasted for nearly two hours and affected more than 38,000 users.

However, Amazon isn’t the only one that has been affected. Back in June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN and Spotify were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to Fastly Inc, a smaller rival of Amazon Web Services.