A prolonged outage of Amazon Web Services — a core component for a vast number of sites and apps — brought part of the internet to a halt Wednesday, as reported earlier by The Verge. The affected sites include not only major players on the web like Flickr, Adobe Spark and Roku, but at least three news outlets.
The Tampa Bay Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Capital Gazette all took to Twitter to inform readers of their AWS-related downtime.
Many apps, services, and websites have posted on Twitter about how the AWS outage is affecting them, including 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post, and WNYC. Downdetector.com has also shown spikes in user reports of problems with many Amazon services throughout the day.
In a statement to The Verge, Amazon said the culprit was its Kinesis Data Streams API, and said it was working on getting the problem fixed. “Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that’s impacted some other AWS services,” it said.
“For Kinesis Data Streams, the issue is affecting the subsystem that is responsible for handling incoming requests. The team has identified the root cause and is working on resolving the issue affecting this subsystem,” it later added.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.
