Amazon Web Service Prolonged Outage Cripples A Huge Portion Of The Web

26/11/2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon’s internet infrastructure service.

As the backbone that supports many websites and apps, it has been experiencing hours of outage. The result of this was that, a huge portion of the internet was also affected.

According to its status page, several AWS services were experiencing problems as of early Wednesday, November 25, 2020.

“We continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region,” said Amazon said in a 3:15PM ET statement on its AWS Service Health Dashboard.

“We also continue to see an improvement in error rates for Kinesis and several affected services, but expect full recovery to still take up to a few hours.”

In a 5:25PM ET update to the dashboard, the company reiterated that timeline. At 7:42PM ET, the company said that it was “observing steady signs of recovery” of the problem affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region.

AWS problems, November 25, 2020
Credit: Downdetector

Amazon reported that the issues only affected its AWS Kinesis, one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. Affected regions was largely localized to North America.

But still, that particular one poses a huge significance that it literally took a large number of internet services down with it.

The apps, services and websites that reported outage, include: 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchestry.com, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Chime, Coinbase, DataCamp, Flickr, Getaround, Glassdoor, iRobot, League of Legends, MeetUp.com, Pokémon GO, Pocket, Prime Music, RadioLab, Ring, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Vonage, and WNYC.

Other impacted services also include smart devices, cryptocurrency portals, and streaming and podcast services.

There are also other sites that also showed significant uptime issues throughout the day.

As a matter of fact, the outage is also affecting Amazon's AWS products, including: ACM, Amplify Console, API Gateway, AppMesh, AppStream2, AppSync, Athena, AutoScaling, Batch, CloudFormation, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, CodeGuru Profiler, CodeGuru Reviewer, CloudMap, Cognito, Comprehend, Connect, DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, EventBridge, GuardDuty, IoT Services, Lambda, LEX, Managed Blockchain, Marketplace, Personalize, Rekognition, Resource Groups, SageMaker, Support Console, Well Architected, and Workspaces.

What this means, Amazon itself is not immune to this particular issue.

It also affected Amazon's “ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard.”

This happened because despite many of the impacted services don't use AWS Kinesis, Amazon said that the Kinesis issue caused problems internally at the company, with errors and second-hand disruption also appearing at other AWS products.

This is why the outage also severed many apps, services and websites to users as far as in Japan.

AWS is one of the most widely-used cloud computing services in the world, so issues the service is having can have major ripple effects for other web services and apps, as evidenced by the number of companies affected by the outage.