Amazon Web Services Outage Brings Much of Life to a Standstill

An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) affected many operations on Tuesday.

The company’s cloud computing unit was hit with an outage that took down many websites and services that day including Disney+ and Coinbase.

More critical internal tools at the company including Flex and AtoZ apps were also affected. The tools are used by warehouse and delivery workers.

For much of the day a notice on AWS’ status page confirmed that there issues in the “U.S.-East-1 Region.”

The issues impacted AWS’ main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia, so not all users may have experienced outages.

The outage began around 11 a.m. EST. As of Tuesday evening, AWS said in an updated notice that many of the underlying issues causing the outage have been mitigated.

All issues impacting the company’s EC2 cloud computing service were resolved as of 6:30 p.m. EST, while other services were still having problems, according to AWS’ status page.

“We are seeing improvement in availability across most AWS services,” the notice stated. “We continue to work toward full recovery for all impacted AWS Services and API operations.”

Disney’s streaming subscription service, Disney+, Netflix, Slack, Ticketmaster, stock trading app Robinhood, and Coinbase, were all affected by the outage.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha confirmed Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations were experiencing problems as a result of the AWS outage.

In a notice sent to delivery drivers via Amazon Chime, an internal chat app, and viewed by CNBC, the company said it was “currently monitoring a network-wide technical outage” impacting delivery operations.

“Should drivers be unable to continue delivering due to the outage, go to a nearby safe location and stand by,” the message continued.

Unable to go about their workday, many warehouse and delivery workers were instructed to wait in break rooms until the issues were resolved.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.