AWS went down - and large parts of the internet went with it

AWS re:Invent 2021 sign
(Image credit: Future / Mike Moore)

UPDATE: 16:35 PM PST / 19:35 ET The official AWS dashboard has published the following statement: "With the network device issues resolved, we are now working towards recovery of any impaired services. We will provide additional updates for impaired services within the appropriate entry in the Service Health Dashboard."

Large parts of the internet have suffered long-lasting issues after multiple outages took down large parts of Amazon Web Services (AWS) network.

Data from real-time outage monitoring service DownDetector saw the incident begin at roughly 12:00 ET/15:30 GMT, with thousands of users registering problems across Europe, Asia and the US throughout the day.

Along with Amazon.com, other major websites including Facebook and Disney Plus, and more appeared to be suffering issues, alongside Amazon services such as Alexa,  Prime Video, Ring, and Chime.

How was the downtime detected? There are a number of online services that proactively track whether popular websites are up or down. They are a variant of website monitoring services, particularly useful for those into website builders or web hosting novices.

AWS down

Amazon’s official status dashboard was updated throughout the day with messages confirming the outage, which centered on the AWS US East-1 region, hosted in Virginia, with some users in other regions not seeing any outages.

Among the services impacted were EC2, Connect, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena, Timestream, and Chime and other AWS Services in US-EAST-1, with increased API error rates seen across the baord.

The outages were centred on a number of core AWS services, including increased API error rates with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, as well as Amazon Connect, which handles contact center calls.

AWS Management Console and AWS Support Center also saw "increased error messages" across all territories.

AWS Management Console acts as a central hub for customers to access their suite of AWS services, allowing them to manage the full gamut of cloud computing and cloud storage.

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.