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Amazon Web Services outage downs major sites again: reports

By Kelly Hayes
Updated  December 15, 2021 11:33am EST
News
FOX TV Digital Team

Social media usage: what outages mean for consumers

The worst outage for Facebook since a 2019 incident took its site offline for more than 24 hours.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) briefly faced another outage on Wednesday morning, according to reports — disrupting services at a range of companies that depend on it.

DownDetector, which tracks user outage reports, showed more than 7,000 reports of issues with Amazon's cloud computing network at one point. Users also reported issues for many major sites, such as Snapchat, Google, Netflix, USPS, Capital One, Zoom, Salesforce, Starbucks, Ring and more.

The livestreaming service Twitch had more than 12,000 reports of issues, DownDetector showed.

Amazon’s status page showed "internet connectivity" issues impacting the "US-WEST-1 Region" and "US-WEST-2 Region," which were later resolved. 

"We have resolved the issue affecting Internet connectivity to the US-WEST-2 Region. Connectivity within the region was not affected by this event. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally," an 8:14 a.m. PT status update reads.

70dcdf5b-AWS And Meta Photo Illustrations

FILE - Amazon Web Services logo displayed on a phone screen and a laptop keyboard are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland, on Dec. 1, 2021. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The reports came after the cloud-service operation was hit with a major outage last week for more than five hours, severely impacting many companies dependent on it to run their operations. 

AWS provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies, including FOX properties, whose publishing system was impacted much of the day during the previous outage.

RELATED: Amazon Web Services outage disrupts US businesses, halts some delivery operations

Widespread and often lengthy outages resulting from single-point failures appear increasingly common. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including CNN, The New York Times and Britain's government home page.

Then in October, Facebook — now known as Meta Platforms — blamed a "faulty configuration change" for an hours-long worldwide outage that took down Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to its titular platform.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.