Amazon web outages: What happened to Amazon web services? All you need to know

E-commerce giant Amazon on Tuesday informed that its cloud-service network had suffered a major outage that led to disruption in access to many popular sites. Amazon's cloud service is known to provide remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies.

Numerous companies and other organisations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services. Roughly five hours after the issues were raised, Amazon in a post informed that it had mitigated the underlying problem responsible for the outage, the Associated Press reported.

Soon, Amazon reported that many services have already recovered, while others were still working towards a full recovery. The outage mainly affected Amazon web services in the eastern United States, the company added.

"Problems began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm. Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha in a statement also confirmed that the e-commerce company's warehouse and delivery operations were also affected due to the AWS outage.

"The company is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible," said Richard Rocha.

Moreover, customers who were trying to book or change their trips with Delta Airlines had trouble connecting to the website. Delta Airlines spokesperson Morgan Durrant also informed that the airlines was "working quickly" to restore functionality to AWS-supported phone lines.

Delta Airlines apologised to its customers and encouraged them to use its website or mobile application instead. Southwest Airlines too reported the issue and informed that it had switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. However, there were no major disruptions to flights, the company spokesperson said.

Apart from the airlines, automobile company Toyota too raised the issue. Toyota Spokesman Scott Vazin said that the company's U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. The company has applications that access inventory data, monthly payment calculators, service bulletins and other items.

More than 20 applications were affected. Madory said that he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. He said that a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved.

"More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration," said Madory adding, "This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen."

Image: AP 

With AP inputs