Appears another major outage hitting Amazon Web Services

FILE - An Amazon logo appears on an Amazon delivery van, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020, in Boston. A major outage in Amazons cloud computing network Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021, severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet and its concentration in the hands of a few firms. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File) (Steven Senne, Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Just two weeks after a major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for more than five hours, the company again reported major issues Wednesday morning.

User reports began to spike on DownDetector.com about 7 a.m. The issues appear to be intermittent, as some users report success in using systems after several attempts.

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According to xda-developers.com, Amazon confirmed a power outage in the US-EAST-1 Region:

“We can confirm a loss of power within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. This is affecting availability and connectivity to EC2 instances that are part of the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone. We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone, or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center.”

The incident earlier this month at Amazon Web Services also mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon’s own massive e-commerce operation. That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day, greatly limiting its ability to publish its news report.

Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong with the Dec. 7 outage. In fact, the company limited its communications to terse technical explanations on an AWS dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon’s own warehouse and delivery operation but said the company was “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues that day, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage, which it did not describe. It took some affected companies hours more to thoroughly check their systems and restart their own services.