Amazon Web Services Hit by Outage
November 25 2020 - 1:21PM
Dow Jones News
By Micah Maidenberg
Amazon.com Inc. reported an outage tied to its enormous
cloud-computing operation that affected many customers.
On a website for Amazon Web Services business, the company said
it was experiencing errors that were causing issues for a range of
cloud-software programs in its region covering the eastern part of
the U.S.
Businesses warned customers on Twitter that their products were
facing problems due to the outage.
Roku Inc., behind its namesake streaming devices, said it had
been affected by the outage. Insteon, which sells products for
homes like thermostats and fan controllers, said in a tweet that
Alexa voice commands for one of its hub systems may fail due to the
outage.
The Chicago Tribune said in a tweet it would post news updates
to social-media sites because it is "experiencing intermittent
issues with our website and publishing system because of the AWS
outage." Operations at The Wall Street Journal were affected.
Cloud-computing services have become more pivotal during the
coronavirus pandemic as many companies have embraced remote
hardware and software services to allow employees to work from
home.
Just before noon on the East Coast, Amazon said a programming
interface for its Kinesis Data Streams product was "severely
impaired," according to the Amazon Web Services website. Kinesis is
able to capture gigabytes of data each second from websites,
financial transactions, social-media feeds and other digital
locations, according to the company.
In a statement, Amazon said the Kinesis product had been
experiencing increased error rates for its east region, affecting
some other services in the cloud unit. "We are working toward
resolution," a spokeswoman said.
Some of the problems with the cloud-based software were tied to
Northern Virginia, according to the Amazon Web Services
website.
Amazon has long been the leader in the business of renting out
cloud-computing infrastructure. More recently, it has faced fresh
challenges from Microsoft Corp., as well as Alphabet Inc.'s Google
and Oracle Corp.
Microsoft and Google in recent months also have suffered issues
with their cloud services.
Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 25, 2020 13:06 ET (18:06 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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