Amazon’s cloud-computing unit problems take down websites, services in Eastern U.S.

SEATTLE — Amazon’s widely used cloud-computing technology suffered significant technical problems in its Eastern U.S. operations, taking chunks of internet-connected services from its customers offline Tuesday morning.

Service improved late in the afternoon. Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage.

In a later post, a little after 7:30 p.m. Eastern time, the company said it would provide additional updates for “impaired services” on its Amazon Web Services health dashboard.

The company offered few details about the outage, instead pointing to the dashboard, which noted that programming interfaces at its data centers in the Eastern United States were “seeing impact.” It added the problems extended to its monitoring and incident response technology, “which is delaying our ability to provide updates.” Amazon noted that it identified the cause and was working toward resolving the problems.

A number of AWS customers noted problems with their services late Tuesday morning. Smartsheet, which provides collaboration software, noted on its status page that its service was unavailable “due to an outage in AWS.” Asana, which offers project management services, noted that some of its offerings were unavailable because of the AWS outage.

Amazon’s own Ring home security business noted on its website that its app was having problems saving changes made by customers, as well as live views from its cameras failing to connect to the app. Ring spokeswoman Emma Daniels said the services’ issues were related to the AWS problems.

The outage also affected operations of The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer.com.

Amazon spokeswoman Kristin Brown declined to offer details about the outage beyond what the company posted on the AWS dashboard. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

A year ago, AWS experienced a major outage that took down large swaths of the web, including Ring, iRobot and the Washington Post. In a lengthy postmortem at the time, AWS said its giant Northern Virginia data center began to fail after the company started to make “a relatively small addition of capacity” to the system. But because of “an operating system configuration,” the new capacity set off a series of errors that overwhelmed Amazon’s network of servers.

AWS is the world’s largest provider of cloud-computing services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the web instead of running their own data centers. In 2020, AWS held 40.8% of the worldwide market for infrastructure cloud services, according to market research firm Gartner. Its closest rival, Microsoft, held 19.7% of the global market.

This article included information from the Associated Press