Amazon Web Services briefly hit by wide-ranging outage, impacting major websites
Amazon Web Services was hit by a wide-ranging outage on Tuesday afternoon that impacted a large number of major websites
By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN
(CNN) — Amazon Web Services was briefly hit by a wide-ranging outage on Tuesday afternoon that impacted a large number of major websites, including the Boston Globe and New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority.
The afternoon outage affected some news organization’s ability to publish coverage of former President Donald Trump’s court appearance in Miami. In a tweet, The Boston Globe wrote, “Amazon Web Services is experiencing an outage, which has affected digital publishing operations at the Globe since around 2:45 p.m. EDT.”
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority similarly reported on Twitter that its website and app are “temporarily unavailable because of an Amazon Web Services outage.” The transit agency said it would post alerts about train and bus service disruptions on Twitter.
Other news outlets such as The Verge also publicly confirmed that their websites were temporarily hit by the AWS outage. Southwest Airlines said in replies on Twitter that it was working with Amazon to resolve issues that some customers were reporting involving accessing its website.
There were some 12,000 reports of issues accessing AWS services on outage-tracking site DownDetector at around 3 p.m. ET, though new reports began to rapidly subside by 5 p.m. ET.
AWS referred CNN’s request for comment to its Service Health dashboard, which first confirmed “increased error rates and latencies” impacting regional servers in its Northern Virginia hub at a little after 3 p.m. ET.
By 5 p.m. ET, the dashboard reported that, “Many AWS services are now fully recovered and marked Resolved on this event. We are continuing to work to fully recover all services.”
The outage was eventually resolved by Tuesday evening. In an update at 6:42 p.m. ET, the dashboard stated that, “The issue has been resolved and all AWS Services are operating normally.”
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