Amazon Web Services suffers third outage in a month

Amazon’s cloud computing unit suffered another outage on Wednesday, a third this month, affecting services like Slack, Epic Games among others.

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The issues started at around 7:30 a.m. ET and Amazon Web Services began investigating connectivity issues at US EAST-1 region at about 7:35 ET. In an hour, AWS said on its status dashboard that it started making progress in restoring power.

At 8:39 a.m. ET, Amazon said it has restored power to all instances and network devices within the affected data centre. However, a few problems persisted in the afternoon as well as the company reported problems at the same cloud facility.

According to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, several companies including Slack experienced problems.

“A small percentage of customers experienced trouble sending and editing messages, loading threads, uploading files, and more,” Slack said on its website.

“This was the result of an outage affecting one of our service providers; trouble ceased once they reestablished services.” Slack had said in the afternoon the issue has been resolved.

Epic Games also tweeted that Internet services outages impacting the Epic Games Store, affecting logins, library, purchases, etc.

AWS is the largest cloud-computing provider in the US, offering customers to rent computing, storage and network capabilities. Since the pandemic, individuals and organisations have increasingly moved to the cloud.

But now it looks like outages are a weekly occurrence for Amazon this month. On December 7, the services for the same US-EAST-1 region were down due to a networking issue. Then on December 17 again, an outage took down services such as Netflix, Disney Plus, Slack and Amazon’s own Ring.