Amazon Web Services, the ubiquitous cloud computing provider that is responsible for supporting large portions of the internet, endured a pretty bad meltdown today. For obvious reasons, that was bad news for the droves of websites and companies that rely on it to keep things running smoothly.
The AWS outage first gained attention on Tuesday afternoon, when it became apparent that all sorts of websites weren’t working exactly the way they should. Details about the outage were quickly made available by Amazon in a public-facing dashboard, showing that the outage was impacting the company’s US-East-1 cloud region. In the meantime, Downdetector went nuts with reports of various web services and websites shitting the bed. By early Tuesday evening, the company claimed that most of the trouble had been put to bed.
AWS provides expansive data storage and processing services to large parts of the internet—which means that when it’s not working, neither are large parts of the internet.
As per usual with outages like this, companies from all walks of life—everything from the Associated Press to McDonald’s to Reddit—suffered massive digital headaches for a stretch of several hours. The Verge reports that the AWS outage broke a variety of fast food apps—including those for the Golden Arches and Taco Bell. The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported that its reporters were having difficulty publishing stories to the web as the news organization readied to report on former President Donald Trump’s court proceedings in Miami. The Boston Globe and other media organizations also reported trouble.
Gizmodo reached out to Amazon for comment and was subsequently directed to the company’s dashboard for updates. When visiting the site, it became clear that one of the impacted platforms—AWS Lambda—was slowly coming back to life. A company spokesperson had previously told a different outlet that many AWS services were “now fully recovered and marked Resolved on this event. We are continuing to work to fully recover all services.”
In the past, AWS outages have caused serious mayhem. Maybe that’s the price we pay for all relying on one company for a majority of our digital needs?
