Business

AWS outage impacts thousands of online services

Issues reported across 28 AWS products, from Kinesis to Worskpaces, and from DynamoDB to IoT Services.

Written by Catalin Cimpanu, Contributor on Nov. 25, 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a core provider of internet infrastructure services, is going through a major outage today, and the service's spotty uptime is now causing huge issues at thousands of other online services across the internet.

Almost all major cloud-based software apps that rely on AWS for their backend are currently impacted, from Adobe Spark to Roku, and from Flickr to Autodesk.

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Other impacted services also include smart devices (currently failing to connect to their private clouds), cryptocurrency portals (failing to process transactions), and streaming and podcast services (limiting users from accessing their accounts).

Among the sites who are reporting issues on the DownDetector page are services like Ring, Prime Music, Pokemon Go, Roku, MeetUp.com, League of Legends, Anchestry.com, Chime, and others.

We believe that the issue is related to the current AWS outage. Our teams are continuing to work to confirm the cause and find a resolution as soon as possible.
— ConnectWise (@ConnectWise) November 25, 2020

AWS is down and impacting login functionality for some @BlockFi clients, we apologize for the inconvenience and are working to be fully up in all regions asap. https://t.co/4z36Kolf6L
— Zac Prince (@BlockFiZac) November 25, 2020

An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting Adobe Spark so you may be having issues accessing/editing your projects. We are actively working with AWS and will report when the issue has subsided. https://t.co/uoHPf44HjL for current Spark status. We apologize for any inconvenience!
— Adobe Spark (@AdobeSpark) November 25, 2020

According to Amazon's status page, at the core of today's outage is AWS Kinesis, an AWS product that can be used to aggregate and analyze large quantities of data in real-time.

While many of the impacted services don't use AWS Kinesis, Amazon said the Kinesis issue actually caused problems internally at the company, with errors and second-hand disruption also appearing at 27 other AWS products.

While the Amazon status page looks like all services are up and running, AWS engineers said the outage is also preventing its engineers from updating its status page — beyond a small message at the top.

For now, the issue appears to be limited to AWS' North America region. Per AWS, besides Kinesis, the following AWS products are also seeing similar issues: