Amazon Web Services Reports Mass Outage, Many Sites Affected

By i24
Posted on 12/07/21 | News Source: i24

During the outage, Kentik recorded a 26 percent decrease in traffic to Netflix

On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a significant outage, restricting service for the many websites hosted on the cloud computing company’s platform.

“We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery,” the AWS website explained an hour after the outage started, adding that “We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time.”

The site did not disclose what prompted the outage, but Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory from the network observability firm Kentik said he did not believe a malicious cause was behind the loss of service.

Madory said it was becoming more common that “these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,” according to the Associated Press.

“This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity, but are very impactful when they happen,” he added.

During the outage, Kentik recorded a 26 percent decrease in traffic to the popular streaming service Netflix, one of the many sites affected.

AWS, which is the world’s biggest cloud computing company, hosts the websites of several major firms, including The Walt Disney Company, General Electric, Sony, pharmaceutical companies Novartis and Pfizer, and Unilever.