An abrupt service outage of Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) caused interruptions across scores of different websites and services last Wednesday. The outage has since been repaired and was later found only to affect services within a specific geographic area.
As one of the most significant cloud computing services globally, Amazon Web Services is relied on by thousands of clients and helps host many different popular websites and services across the web. As such, when an entire geographic region of Amazon's expansive network suffered from a "glitch," countless different websites and services suffered from outages.
Streaming firm Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU) was among the many services struck with difficulties during the outage. Around noon on Nov. 25, Roku took to Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), notifying users that it was aware of the outage but providing little details. Image and video hosting service Flickr also notified users on Twitter of the outage, identifying the AWS outage as the culprit.
Other companies hit by the outage include Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), ESPN (parent company Disney, (NYSE: DIS), as well as a few newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and Capital Gazette. The New York City Transit Authority also suffered from technical problems, being unable to issue service alerts for the city's subway network.
According to Amazon, the issue was its Kinesis Data Streams API.
"Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our U.S.-East-1 Region that's impacted some other AWS services," the firm said. "For Kinesis Data Streams, the issue is affecting the subsystem that is responsible for handling incoming requests. The team has identified the root cause and is working on resolving the issue affecting this subsystem."
There doesn't seem to be much news on the state of the glitch, and if there remains any danger of a second outage. In the days since the outage, however, there doesn't appear to have been any lasting problems.