Amazon

Another Amazon Web Services Outage Disrupts Epic Games, Slack and Other Sites

It is the third outage to hit Amazon Web Services this month

Amazon’s cloud-service network was hit with another outage Wednesday morning, impacting a number of users and disrupting access to several popular sites.

A post on Amazon Web Services status page confirmed the problem was due to a power outage at one of its data centers in Northern Virginia. By 8:40 a.m. ET, the company announced in an update it had restored power to the affected data center within the impacted Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region, however several users were still reporting issues. 

"We continue to make progress in recovering the remaining EC2 instances and EBS volumes within the affected Availability Zone," the company wrote in an updated post on the AWS status page at 9:13 a.m. ET. "If you are able to relaunch affected EC2 instances within the affected Availability Zone, that may help to speed up recovery. We have a small number of affected EBS volumes that are still experiencing degraded IO performance that we are working to recover. The majority of AWS services have also recovered, but services which host endpoints within the customer’s VPCs - such as single-AZ RDS databases, ElasticCache, Redshift, etc. - continue to see some impact as we work towards full recovery."

The company's web services network provides remote computing services to many companies, governments and universities.

Customers began reporting outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reports, just after 7:30 a.m. ET, with sites like Amazon, Hulu, InstaCart, Epic Games, Slack and others impacted. While most of the affected sites appeared to have restored access less than two hours later, an update posted on AWS' status page at 11:02 a.m. ET acknowledged some users were still experiencing networking issues.

"We continue to work on mitigating the networking impact for EC2 instances within the affected data center, and expect to see further recovery there starting in the next 30 minutes," the post said. "Since the EC2 APIs have been healthy for some time within the affected Availability Zone, the fastest path to recovery now would be to relaunch affected EC2 instances within the affected Availability Zone or other Availability Zones within the region."

The outage comes less than two weeks after AWS suffered a historic outage that took down operations at several popular websites and services for more than five hours on Dec. 8. A week later, the company was hit with another outage on the U.S. West coast, appeared to cause problems at multiple sites, including DoorDash, Twitch, Hulu and PlayStation Network, according to reports on Down Detector

This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.

Contact Us