Amazon outage hits Disney, Netflix and Coinbase
The issue also brought down key tools used inside Amazon, affecting its warehouses, delivery drivers and sellers
A major network outage hit Amazon's cloud computing division on Tuesday evening, knocking out websites, apps and streaming platforms worldwide. The outage also affected internal tools at the company, including the Flex and AtoZ apps that are used by warehouse and delivery workers, making it impossible for them to scan packages or access delivery routes.
Amazon's namesake e-commerce website Amazon.com and its Prime Video service went down for thousands of users as a result of the outage, as did Disney+, Netflix, Ticketmaster, Slack, Coinbase, and stock trading app Robinhood. Ring security cameras, robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot, and mobile banking app Chime also faced issues.
Amazon sellers told CNBC that they were unable to access Seller Central, an internal website used to manage customer orders, as a result of the outage.
The issue began at around 10:45 EST (15:45 GMT), and a notice on AWS' status page later confirmed that the company was experiencing problems in the 'US-East-1 Region'.
'We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery,' the notice stated.
Outage tracking service Downdetector showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon.
At 13:12 EST, AWS said it was 'starting to see some signs of recovery,' but said it did not have 'an ETA for full recovery at this time'.
At 17:43 EST, the company said it had mitigated the underlying issue that had affected some network devices in the US-EAST-1 Region. There were also 'improvement in availability across most AWS services'.
About two hours later, the company said it had resolved all network device issues, and its engineers had started to work towards the recovery of any impaired services.
This was the second outage for Amazon in the last 12 months.
In June, a blip at AWS took out sites like Reddit, Twitch, Twitter, HBO Max, Hulu, Shopify and Amazon itself.
A month later, the company experienced problems in its online stores service, following a service disruption from content distribution network Akamai. The disruption lasted for about two hours and affected more than 38,000 Amazon users.
Another issue affected the company just outside of the 12 month window, in November last year. AWS was hit with a massive outage that took down thousands of websites and services, including those belonging to Adobe, Flickr, Roku, Twilio and Autodesk.
The company said the issue was triggered by the addition of new servers to the Amazon Kinesis real-time data processing service. Amazon said at the time that it would apply lessons learned to improve the reliability of its services