24,000 disruptions in the United States and Canada: AWS outage stalls thousands of companies

Amazon’s US customers need patience with their Christmas shopping Tuesday. The reason for this was that New York Times report, AWS cloud services failure. According to the report, Amazon Logistics Centers across the US had to cease operations on Tuesday because the logistics processes from AWS Cloud were no longer working.

The failure of AWS affected not only Amazon, but several other companies in the United States, such as the Associated Press (AP) news agency or the McDonald’s app, reports US-website downdetector, The AWS-based booking system at Delta Airlines failed. At Toyota in the United States, for example, sales services no longer worked. Consumers also reported problems with Roomba vacuum cleaners, Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, and Amazon’s security cameras. And Ticketmaster announced that advance sales of tickets for singer Adele’s tour have been delayed. In the greater New York area, the MTA transport operator’s app also failed, causing disruption. In total, Downdetector reports over 24,000 malfunctions that were related to AWS outages.

In addition, not only the East Coast of the United States was affected, but Canada was also affected. So uses about the Canadian news site global news According to the Federal Government of Canada, AWS services. But popular services such as streaming services Netflix and Disney+, messaging platform Slack, digital wallet service Venmo, voice app Duolingo or stock trading service Robinhood were also affected by the disruption, according to Global News. It also hit news websites like The Globe and Mail.

Amazon fails itself at an unfavorable time, because for the online retailer, the Christmas business is one of the periods with the highest sales of the year. According to US media, the company’s online sales are increasing steadily as Christmas approaches. In addition, the situation in the logistics centers looked chaotic. According to the New York Times, employees on Facebook and other forums reported that their superiors had sent them over for lunch an hour earlier in the hope that their return would solve the problems. Others said their superiors asked them to sweep the floor or offered unpaid leave to those who wanted to leave early. Many reported that they simply waited and rested in the break room.

For many users in the United States, a culprit was quickly found: they suspected – in view of the tension between US President Biden and Russian President Putin – a massive cyberattack by Russia. From AW, a final explanation for the failure has not yet been given. There are two attempts to explain this on the Internet: First, there is talk that AWS had a problem with the network equipment, causing it to fail. Second, it stated that the failure was likely due to an API-related issue. The incident is being reported from AWS Data Center us-east-1. This is Amazon’s largest data center on the east coast of the US.