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Amazon Web Services outage: Power loss causes issues for some users on East Coast

By Michelle Ewing and Theresa Seiger, Cox Media Group National Content Desk
By Michelle Ewing and Theresa Seiger, Cox Media Group National Content Desk

Officials with Amazon confirmed issues Wednesday morning with its cloud-computing program, Amazon Web Services, which appeared to be causing outages for some users on several popular websites, including Slack, Imgur and others.

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Reports on DownDetector, a site which monitors website outages, indicated several sites were affected. In a status update posted online around 7:35 a.m. EST, officials with Amazon acknowledged problems with its application programming interface, or API. The issues were beginning to be resolved around 8:20 a.m., according to the company.

Officials said “launch failures and networking connectivity issues” were reported early Wednesday in part of AWS’ main US-East-1 region, hosted in Northern Virginia. Not all users were affected by the issues, according to Amazon.

>> Related: Amazon Web Services outage disrupts dozens of sites

Just after 8 a.m., officials said they were investigating a power outage in a single data center within one of the nine availability zones in the US-East-1 region, causing connectivity issues for some Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud customers.

Amazon said they restored power to “all instances and network devices” within the affected data center just before 8:40 a.m. Around 9:15 a.m., the company reported “recovery for the majority” of customers.

“The majority of AWS services have also recovered,” officials said.

Network connectivity issues persisted for some users as of about 3:10 p.m., according to Amazon. Ongoing issues appeared to be related to the way in which the data center lost power, “which has led to failure in the underlying hardware,” company officials said earlier.

Wednesday’s issues came about two weeks after an hours-long AWS outage disrupted access to several popular sites, including Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix and Ring. Company officials said the Dec. 7 outage was caused by unexpected issues with an automated process that caused communication delays between AWS’ internal and main networks.

Check back for more on this developing story.

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