Massive internet outage at Amazon Web Services takes down Netflix, Disney+ and more websites, streaming apps

By Team Newsable | First Published Dec 8, 2021, 12:48 PM IST

AWS had suffered a widespread outage Tuesday night causing higher loading times or failures for a significant part of the internet.

As consumers shopped ahead of Christmas, a widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to temporarily knock out streaming platform Netflix, Disney +, Robinhood, various apps, and Amazon.com Inc e-commerce websites. “Many services have already recovered, however, we are working towards full recovery across services,” Amazon said on its status dashboard. AWS had suffered a widespread outage Tuesday night causing higher loading times or failures for a significant part of the internet.

The tech giant on Tuesday had said, “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.”

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Trading app Robinhood and Walt Disney’s streaming service Disney+ and Netflix were also down, according to Downdetector.com. Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik, said, “Netflix which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS appears to have lost 26% of its traffic.” Amazon said the outage was related to network devices and linked to application programming interface, or API, which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software, Reuters reported.

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The outage was limited to its US-EAST 1 region, so not all users may have been affected by the outage directly. According to Downdetector, a service that tracks internet outages, a host of services including popular streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and Roku, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and gaming services such as Fortnite, Minecraft and PlayStation network were affected. It also impacted Amazon’s own services including Alexa and Ring.

Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon, including Prime Video and other services. The outage tracking website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. Users began reporting issues around 10:40 am ET on Tuesday (9:10 pm IST) and the outage might have affected a larger number of users.

Amazon has experienced 27 outages over the past 12 months related to its services, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester.

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