Amazon suffered a power outage on Tuesday that disrupted web services for many U.S. companies for hours and caused delays in the company's delivery services.
The power outage was not detailed by Amazon, but a spokeswoman said the company was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. The incident affected airline reservations, car dealerships, payment apps, streaming services, and Coinbase, mostly in the eastern half of the U.S. Amazon struggled with the Flex App or AutoZ app, making it impossible to scan packages or access delivery hours. Amazon warehouse and delivery workers were forced to wait inside the breakroom until the issue was resolved.
This was the first power outage of Amazon Web Services since November 2020. Some cybersecurity experts think that the Amazon power outage is the reason why a handful of tech companies should not be allowed to dominate much of the internet. The power outage put into perspective how badly some people take the internet and modern technology for granted as they struggled to upload homework assignments.
As of Tuesday evening, Amazon said many of the problems causing the outage have been mitigated and all issues affecting cloud computing services have been resolved.
The company stated that there was improvement in availability across most of the AWS services. We continue to work toward full recovery for all affected AWS Services and API operations. The outage came at peak season when holiday shoppers are trying to arrive at their destinations on time.