AWS outage takes down sites and apps

Customers started experiencing errors and latencies with multiple AWS services Tuesday evening

Multiple websites and applications experienced outages and access issues Tuesday evening as Amazon Web Services investigated a problem with its AWS Lambda serverless compute service.

Tens of thousands of users reported outages for AWS around 7pm BST on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, with most being customers in North America.

The Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles, The Boston Globe and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority were among the organisations to take to Twitter to report outages due to AWS.

AWS posted on its service health dashboard that customers started experiencing errors and latencies with multiple AWS services at 11:49 a.m. Pacific. The errors hit services in the US-East-1 Region in Northern Virginia and lasted about two hours, according to AWS, considered the No. 1 cloud computing vendor in the market.

AWS outage

The vendor said "many" services fully recovered by 10 pm BST and considered the event "resolved."

"We are continuing to work to fully recover all services," the post said.

AWS posted at 10.30 pm that asynchronous invocation executions may experience "continued delays" while Lambda processes a backlog "during the next few hours."

AWS attributed the root cause to a subsystem responsible for Lambda capacity management, according to a post from the vendor. The issue "caused errors directly for customers (including through API Gateway) and indirectly through the use by other AWS services."

Customers experienced authentication and sign-in errors when using AWS Management Console, Cognito or IAM STS. They also experienced issues when trying to call or chat with AWS Support.

Other organisations that took to Twitter to notify users about outages due to AWS include: Phantom crypto wallet; The Verge media outlet; Webflow website builder; College Board's BigFuture student planning guide; the Associated Press news organisation; and the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners certification body.

It was not immediately clear if Tuesday's outage was on the scale of the major AWS outage in 2021 that downed services from ConnectWise, Netflix, Disney+, Ticketmaster, Flickr and others.

This article first appeared on CRN