Significant Outage for Amazon Web Services Stalls Netflix, Delta Airlines, Others

Amazon Web Services was struck with a significant outage across their web-hosting services Tuesday, preventing many from accessing services like Netflix and Delta Airlines, along with several other popular services. According to DownDetector, a popular website that tracks reports of internet service outages, reports of issues with Amazon Web Services started coming in around 10:30 EST Tuesday morning. Outages were also reported among popular services like Disney+, Venmo, the McDonald's app, Capital One, Roku and many others. The outages were caused by issues with Amazon's US-east-1 servers that are based in Virginia. The company posted updates on the service's status website to inform that the problem has been identified and they are working toward a solution and have seen some improvement, but there was no ETA for when services will be fully recovered as of about 3:30 p.m. EST. In addition to outages for third-party sites, the outage was also affecting Amazon's other services like Ring smart home systems, Amazon Echo smart speakers and their video and music streaming platforms, according to Business Insider. Doug Madory, director of internet analysis an Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm, told the Associated Press he did not believe the outage was caused by any one party with ill intentions. He said outages similar to Tuesday's in recent months and years show how the internet industry has changed. "More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration," he said. "This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen."

The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including AP. The outage also affected Amazon's ability to provide status updates, it said. "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," Madory said. Kentik was seeing a 26 percent drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage, Madory said. Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines were having trouble connecting to the airline. "Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines," spokesperson Morgan Durrant said.

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The airline apologized and encouraged customers to use its website or mobile app instead. According to DownDetector, Southwest was also affected, but not American, United, Alaska or JetBlue. People trying to use Instacart and Kindle have reported issues. Toyota spokesperson Scott Vazin said the company's U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. The company has apps that process dealer warranty claims and other services, and over 20 apps were affected. It wasn't immediately clear how, or whether, the outage was affecting the federal government. The White House referred questions to the nation's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, which directed queries to Amazon. The Associated Press contributed to this report.