Amazon Web Services outage hits popular sites

Amazon Web Services suffered a major downtime Tuesday, disrupting access to many popular sites, the company said.

Cloud computing services are provided by AMZN, which provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities, and companies.

Amazon said in a post-an hour after the outage began that it had identified the root cause and was actively working towards recovery. The issue primarily affected its services in the Eastern U.S. It didn't reveal any additional details about the cause.

The dashboard was updated to show that the company was beginning to see signs of recovery. We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time. The outage also affected Amazon's ability to provide status updates.

Problems began on the US East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc., a network intelligence firm. AWS is the biggest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption has a big impact on many popular websites and other internet services, he said.

Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines DAL were having trouble connecting to the airline. Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines, according to Morgan Durrant, a spokeswoman for Delta. The airline encouraged customers to use its website or mobile app instead.

Southwest Airlines LUV, a Dallas-based company, said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. More than three hours after they started, customers reported outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reports. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.

People trying to use Disney DIS, Kindle, Roku ROKU and Instacart Venmo PYPL have reported issues, according to DownDetector. The MCD app of McDonald was down. American AAL, United UAL, Alaska ALK, and JetBlue JBLU were not affected.

Scott Vazin, Toyota TM spokesman said the company's U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. Over 20 of the apps that the company has are responsible for dealer warranty claims and other services were affected.

Madory said he did not believe that the outage was anything nefarious. He said that the networking industry has evolved because of the recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites.

He said more and more of these outages end up being the result of automation and centralization of administration. This ends up leading to outages that are hard to avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen. According to Madory, Kentik saw a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage.

It was not clear if the outage was affecting the federal government. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email that it was working with Amazon to understand the potential impact this outage may have on federal agencies or other partners.