Amazon Suffers Power Outage As Holiday Shopping Season Ramps Up
Amazon suffered a power outage on Tuesday that disrupted web services for many U.S. companies for hours and caused delays in the company’s delivery services.
Amazon has not detailed the cause of the power outage, but spokesperson Richard Rosa said the company “was working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
The incident affected mostly the eastern half of the U.S., impacting airline reservations, car dealerships, payment apps, streaming services and crypto exchange Coinbase. Amazon struggled using the Flex App or AutoZ app, making it impossible to scan packages or access delivery hours. Many Amazon warehouse and delivery workers were forced to wait inside the breakroom until the issue was resolved.
This marked the first Amazon Web Services power outage since November 2020. Some cybersecurity experts will argue the Amazon power outage is the reason why a handful of big tech companies should not be allowed to dominate much of the internet. The power outage put into perspective how badly some people take the internet and modern technology for granted as students struggled to upload homework assignments.
As of Tuesday evening Amazon said many of the problems causing the outage have been mitigated and all issues impacting cloud computing services were resolved.
“We are seeing improvement in availability across most AWS services,” the company stated. “We continue to work toward full recovery for all impacted AWS Services and API operations.”
The outage came at “peak season” when holiday shoppers are constantly placing orders hoping they arrive at their destinations on time.
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