Amazon down: Shopping giant and web services hit by technical problems, causing issues across internet

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 07 December 2021 13:26 EST
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Amazon Web Services, the shopping giant’s internet infrastructure arm, is experiencing technical issues that are echoing across much of the rest of the internet.

A variety of websites and services were hit by problems apparently because of issues with the underlying technology, which is provided by Amazon Web Services or AWS.

That included many of the world’s biggest apps and services, from Disney Plus and Tinder to Coinbase. Games were also hit, with PUBG and League of Legends seeming to go down.

It also hit other Amazon-owned services, including the Alexa voice assistant, the Kindle, Amazon Music and its Ring security cameras.

But it did not appear to be a problem in all locations. Amazon said the problems were in the “US-EAST-1” which is hosted in Virginia and serves areas nearby, meaning that people reliant on other parts of the AWS network may still be able to load services, though it might perform more slowly than usual.

Live updates on the Amazon outage

Amazon said that it had found the “root cause and we are actively working towards recovery”, though it gave no indication of how long that might take.

Amazon Web Services provide the technology that powers much of the internet. It sells those services to other unrelated companies, meaning that any issues with AWS can quickly take down other, apparently unconnected, parts of the web.

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