Due to a power outage, Amazon’s critical web services business AWS is experiencing issues today, affecting services like Slack, Imgur, and the Epic Games store for some users. If you work from home, things aren’t looking good, with some Slack users unable to view or upload images and work management tool Asana also experiencing issues.
The issues were blamed on power outages in a single data center, affecting one Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) within the US-EAST-1 Region, according to the official AWS service health dashboard. Amazon announced that it had restored power to the affected servers at 9:13 a.m. ET, and that it had “restored underlying connectivity to the majority of the remaining” systems by 12:28 p.m. ET. Users may, however, continue to experience issues as services and servers are relaunched.
Internet data center room with server and networking device on rack cabinet and kvm monitor with charts on screen and cloud services icon with connection lines, cloud computing concept
Amazon declared the problem resolved at 7:22 p.m. ET, a little over twelve hours after it began. However, that restore did not always resolve all of the issues for all of the affected servers. Amazon’s difficulties are explained in the last AWS status page update:
Starting at 4:11 AM PST some EC2 instances and EBS volumes experienced a loss of power in a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances in other data centers within the affected Availability Zone and other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region were not affected by this event.
At 4:55 AM PDT, power was restored to EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the affected data center, which allowed the majority of EC2 instances and EBS volumes to recover. However, due to the nature of the power event, some of the underlying hardware experienced failures, which needed to be resolved by engineers within the facility.
Engineers worked to recover the remaining EC2 instances and EBS volumes affected by the issue. By 2:30 PM PST, we recovered the vast majority of EC2 instances and EBS volumes. However, some of the affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes were running on hardware that has been affected by the loss of power and is not recoverable.
For customers still waiting for recovery of a specific EC2 instance or EBS volume, we recommend that you relaunch the instance or recreate the volume from a snapshot for a full recovery. If you need further assistance, please contact AWS Support.
At the height of the outage, Slack’s services were “experiencing difficulty with file uploads, message editing, and other services,” according to an incident update. The troubles caused a “severe outage,” according to Asana, with “many of our users unable to access Asana.” “Internet services disruptions” were “affecting logins, libraries, purchases, and other things,” Epic Games Store warned.
Even though Amazon’s restoration continues, it looks that the affected services are mostly back online. Around 3:13 p.m. ET, a Slack page tracking the connectivity issues reported that the issue had been rectified.
It’s the third time in as many weeks that AWS issues have caused major disruptions to online services. Two AWS outages earlier this month knocked out a wide range of platforms and products, including streaming sites like Netflix and Disney Plus, as well as smart home devices like Ring and Wyze security cameras.
Today’s outages appear to be less widespread, but they are still noticeable, with some users unable to access services completely and others experiencing intermittent problems. Reports of issues with the platforms mentioned above, as well as news aggregator, Flipboard, online learning site Udemy, dating app Grindr, streaming service Hulu, and IoT services from Honeywell, Life360, and Samsung’s SmartThings are all available on DownDetector.com.
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