Amazon Web Services Hit by Outage -- Update
November 26 2020 - 11:44AM
Dow Jones News
By Micah Maidenberg
Amazon.com Inc. grappled with an hourslong outage tied to its
enormous cloud-computing operation that affected many businesses,
forcing them to warn their customers about product disruptions
The service interruption that affected a wide swath of customers
began early Wednesday and lasted throughout the day as Amazon Web
Services, as the online retailing giant's cloud division is called,
scrambled to fully restore functions. Amazon said early Thursday
all services were back to normal operations.
Before service was restored, 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. A Roku spokeswoman said users could
still stream content. 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.
Amazon, on its cloud-computer site, had earlier said a
programming interface for its Kinesis Data Streams product was
impaired. As a result, customers weren't able to read or write data
tied to its streams. 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.
Amazon said it had found the cause of the problem and had taken
steps so it wouldn't recur.
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 26, 2020 11:29 ET (16:29 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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