HIGHLIGHTS
- An AWS outage has disrupted the e-commerce Amazon giant’s deliveries.
- At the height of the problem, the web monitoring site reported over 20,000 complaints against Amazon and over 11,000 complaints against Amazon Web Services.
- The problems came during Amazon’s key holiday shopping season when the company couldn’t afford to delay.
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AWS Outage
AWS is an Amazon subsidiary that provides leading cloud computing services, selling companies’ computing power and on-demand software services. Its customers include many industries and the federal government.
Three delivery service partners said an application by Amazon.com Inc. used to communicate with delivery drivers that have stopped working because of a system error. Truckers or even Amazon Flex drivers can’t log into the app to receive tasks.
The outage began around 10 a.m. Eastern time, at the height of the problem, the web monitoring site reported over 20,000 complaints against Amazon and over 11,000 complaints against Amazon Web Services. By 1:45 p.m., the number of reported outages had dropped by about half for AWS and two-thirds for Amazon.
At the height of the problem, the monitoring site reported more than 11,000 complaints against Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Around 1 p.m., Amazon directed customers to alternative servers in the West region with no issues. On the evening of the same day, Amazon said: “With the network equipment issues resolved, we are currently working to fix any faulty services.”
Consequences of this incident
The problems came during Amazon’s key holiday shopping season when the company couldn’t afford to delay. One West Coast delivery business owner said the company halted deliveries on Tuesday and plans to regroup the next day.
Two delivery partners in earlier time zones said drivers that already had routes were instructed to put their phones in airplane mode and not log out of the Amazon routing app so they could continue making stops, but drivers who hadn’t already been assigned routes were sidelined.
Multiple Amazon cloud-computing services had been affected, including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute. This has impacted many popular websites, including those operated by Coinbase Global Inc., Robinhood Markets Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc., etc.
Disney said that though people were able to get into its parks, they were having difficulty checking in online and paying for purchases. Some Amazon services, including music and video streaming, the voice-activated Alexa platform and security arm, Ring, were affected, too.
Video streaming service Netflix experienced a 26% drop in traffic after the AWS problems were reported, showing how quickly outages can ripple outward, said Doug Madory, an analyst at the network monitoring firm Kentik in San Francisco.“It gets more and more complicated with software running these services, so when something goes sideways it can take a long time to figure out what went wrong and fix it.”
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