Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage on Tuesday, impacting various Amazon-owned services. This disruption led to the closure of self-checkout lanes at Whole Foods supermarkets, halted delivery routes, and caused Alexa devices to stop functioning.
AWS Service Health Dashboard Update
According to the AWS service health dashboard, as of 6 p.m. PDT, there was a “degradation” of multiple services. AWS stated that their engineers were working on “resolving the increased error rates and latencies for Kinesis APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The issue began at 3:12 PM PDT when a subsystem within Kinesis started to experience increased contention while processing incoming data. This primarily affected internal AWS services such as CloudWatch, ECS Fargate, and API Gateway.
AWS assured users that they had identified the root cause of the Kinesis issue and were working to address the contention. Despite progress, they anticipated that it would take 2-3 hours to fully resolve the problem.
Continued Recovery Efforts
In a further update at 6:59 p.m. PDT, AWS mentioned that recovery efforts were ongoing, albeit slower than initially expected. They noted internal improvements, though these might not be visible to users yet.
Widespread Impact
Downdetector.com, a website that tracks internet outages, has reported 348 AWS outage reports as of 8:52 p.m. ET. The outage affected a variety of services beyond Whole Foods and Alexa.
In Philadelphia, a News Media reporter observed all self-checkout lanes closed at a Whole Foods store. The store’s workers reported that the outage prevented the scanning of Prime codes.
The app’s nationwide issues also affected Amazon Flex drivers, with one driver reporting on Downdetector that the app had sent them home. Another delivery driver mentioned they were unable to complete their route as the app was down.
The outage also affected other Amazon-owned services, such as Ring and Goodreads.
The AWS outage caused significant disruptions across various Amazon services, highlighting the interconnected nature of these systems. AWS engineers continue to work on resolving the issue and restoring normal service. We advise users to exercise patience as AWS works towards a full recovery.
