RALEIGH – A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for more than five hours, the latest sign of just how concentrated the business of keeping the internet running has become.

The incident at Amazon Web Services 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. In fact, the company limited its communications Tuesday 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.”

Screenshot of Down Detector webpage for Amazon Web Services, 12/07/2021.

Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues, 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.

The outage was broad in its scope.

From e-commerce shopping to livestreaming to trading cryptocurrencies, a wide variety of Internet companies are experiencing outages, and a statement from Amazon indicated early on that the outages may stem from an issue with Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

According to Down Detector, reports of an issue with Amazon Web Services began at about 10:40 eastern time, and accelerated quickly.

The Down Detector Twitter account noted the issue.

The Down Detector Twitter account recently tweeted that Cary-based Epic Games is experiencing outages.

CNBC has confirmed that Disney’s streaming subscription service, Disney+, and Netflix were down as a result of the outage, as were collaboration tool Slack, and the trading apps for Robinhood and Coinbase.  CNBC also reported that some Amazon sellers were unable to access a tool used to manage customer orders, Seller Central.

“We are seeing impact to multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the statement from Amazon reads.

Amazon Web Services provided the below details about the outage in the statement:

  • “9:18 AM PST We can confirm degraded Contact handling by agents in the US-EAST-1 Region. Agents may experience issues logging in or being connected with end-customers.”
  • “9:26 AM PST We can confirm increased error rates for the Support Center console and Support API in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified the root cause of the issue and are working towards resolution.”

Fidelity, which operates a facility in the Triangle, is also experiencing outages, according to Down Detector’s Twitter account.

TVNewsCheck is reporting that airlines Delta and Southwest have been affected, as well as some users of Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, and Roku, and also that the McDonald’s app is down.

“This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” the statement from Amazon reads.  “We have identified root cause of the issue causing service API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region, and are starting to see some signs of recovery,” the statement reads.