AWS outage takes out a chunk of the Internet

By Jay Peters for The Verge

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s Internet infrastructure service that is the backbone of many websites and apps, experienced a major outage affecting a large portion of the Internet.

“Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that’s impacted some other AWS services,” Amazon said in a statement to The Verge. “We are working toward resolution.” And, ironically, in a notice on the AWS Service Health Dashboard, Amazon said the issue has apparently “affected our ability to post updates” to that dashboard.

A number of apps and services have posted on Twitter about how the AWS outage is affected them — it seems the issue is fairly widespread:

• Flickr
• Adobe
• Anchor
• RSS
• The New York subway

Downdetector.com also showed spikes in user reports of problems with many Amazon services.