This Tuesday, several Amazon services – including its website, Prime Video and applications that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) – went down for thousands of users.
Outages of this kind are nothing new for Amazon. In July, the company experienced a disruption in its online store's services, which affected more than 38,000 users and lasted for nearly two hours. And web tool reviewing website ToolTester reports that Amazon users have experienced 27 outages on the site, over just the past twelve months.
Amazon has said the outage was likely caused by issues related to the application programming interface (API). API is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.
The outage affected delivery operations, with Amazon’s warehouse operation experiencing disruptions that led facilities to a total standstill. Amazon’s Ring security cameras, their mobile banking app chime and their robot vacuum cleaner iRobot were also impacted.
Because of their connection to Amazon via Amazon Web Services, the popular site Internet Movie Database (IMDB), the language learning app Duolingo and the dating site Tinder were also affected. Presale tickets for singer Adele’s upcoming performances in the States were also impacted, with the presale of the verified fan tickets being moved to Wednesday.
A similar situation happened back in June, where the hour-long outage experienced by US-based content delivery network provider Fastly Inc, a rival of AWS, impacted a whole host of popular and highly frequented websites. These included PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, Reddit, CNN, Amazon and the Guardian.
According to Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, more than 24,000 reports were filed by Amazon users over issues with using the site.
Amazon has publicly commented that the cause was API and console issues in their US-East 1 region. By Tuesday afternoon, the outage was partially resolved, as Amazon had sorted out their network device issues but still needed to recover their impaired services.