Widespread Amazon outage wipes out a portion of the internet

An outage at the Jeff Bezos-owned AWS knocked several businesses offline

Amazon’s popular cloud computing service suffered a widespread outage which knocked several businesses offline on Wednesday. 

Media organisations such as the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post were unable to publish stories on their websites as a result. 

Local school networks and the New York City subway service tweeted that their services were impaired. 

Also taken offline were car sharing service Getaround, which lets people unlock cars using their phones, photo sharing site Flickr, recruitment website Glassdoor, smart TV company Roku and software giant Adobe.

The problem appeared to be linked to an Amazon-owned data centre on the east coast of the US. On its website, Amazon said that programming software for its Kinesis Data Streams service was “severely impaired”.

The outage affected the company’s ability to post updates to its service health dashboard.

A spokesman said: “Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that’s impacted some other AWS services. We are working toward resolution.” 

An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App. Please know that our team is aware and monitoring the situation and hope to get the App back online soon. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

— iRobot (@iRobot) November 25, 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most widely-used cloud computing services in the world and counts the likes of Goldman Sachs, the CIA, Apple and Britain’s Home Office among its customers. 

The retail giant’s overall profits have been driven by rocketing demand for utilising its computers, similarly to how gas and electricity providers supply power. Amazon predicts that AWS revenues will reach $71bn (£56bn) by 2022.

Cloud computing has long been favoured by startups who do not have a legacy of on-premise infrastructure thanks to its cheap, easy and flexible computing services. But executives have traditionally been put off by the threat of outages and data leaks. 

Google, which also offers cloud computing, suffered a five-hour outage in August which left much of Britain offline as they worked from home.