While Amazon managed to intelligently sidestep the supply chain turmoil currently strangling other retailers, the eCommerce giant has an entirely different problem on its hands at the moment.
According to The Verge, Amazon Web Services cloud servers in Virginia are currently down, with the outage not only hampering Amazon’s apps and services but other parts of the internet as well. Even The Verge is currently experiencing issues because of it.
The disruption appears to be localized to Amazon’s US-EAST-1 cluster of AWS servers. For users, the outage is manifesting as longer loading times, connection timeouts, and error messages when trying to connect to services hosted on the affected servers.
Amazon’s warehouse and delivery workers, along with Amazon Flex drivers, are reporting that internal apps used by the company and its employees to track and deliver packages have gone down because of the outage. If you were expecting an Amazon delivery that’s running late, this may be why.
There have also been reports of users facing problems when trying to access Amazon.com and other Amazon products like the Alexa AI assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music, and Ring security cameras
The effects of the server outage are being felt throughout the World Wide Web, beyond just Amazon apps and services — users are having trouble with streaming services like Disney Plus and Netflix, and even games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, League of Legends, and Valorant have been affected.
According to DownDetector, many popular apps and services, including Tinder, Roku, Coinbase, Cash App, and Venmo are also seeing increased outage reports.
Amazon is aware of the issue and believes the root cause to be “an impairment of several network devices.” The company says a fix is being worked on, and it is providing continuous progress updates (along with possible workarounds) on its AWS service status page.
The most recent update, posted at 12:34 PM PST, reads:
We continue to experience increased API error rates for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices. 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. For customers experiencing issues signing-in to the AWS Management Console in US-EAST-1, we recommend retrying using a separate Management Console endpoint (such as https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/). Additionally, if you are attempting to login using root login credentials you may be unable to do so, even via console endpoints not in US-EAST-1. If you are impacted by this, we recommend using IAM Users or Roles for authentication. We will continue to provide updates here as we have more information to share.
