Elaine Jean Tech 12.22.2021 13:Dec PM EST

Amazon Web Services Down Again: This Month's Third Outage Affects Asana, Slack, Epic Games Store

Various websites and streaming platforms were affected by an outage at Amazon Web Services on Wednesday (Dec. 22).

AWS experienced its third outage this month due to a power outage at a single data center.

The power outage was reported at roughly 8 a.m. ET Wednesday, according to an AWS status page. However, Amazon's third outage for the overall Amazon Web Services is already in the process of restoration.

Amazon's Latest Outage

WTOP.com and other websites that use Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud-service network had experienced multiple function difficulties.

Starting at 6:59 a.m., DownDetector, a clearinghouse for user outage complaints, revealed a massive rise in outages. With that, Amazon stated that this Amazon Outage issue has no effect on connectivity or power to other data centers within the impacted Availability Zone or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region.

Amazon clarified that they are still working to resolve the problem and restore electricity to the affected data center.

A heat map for the Amazon Outage issues revealed that the worst of them is experienced in Washington, D.C. area. Unfortunately, problems were also reported in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities.

Furthermore, just after 9 a.m., AWS declared that the issues had been rectified, but that sites will be restored gradually.

As reported by USA Today, according to a Coinbase spokesperson, the AWS outage disruption caused multiple cryptocurrency transactions on the Coinbase app and website to be delayed. As stated, their system problems were immensely experienced and lasted for roughly 20 minutes.

At 7:58 a.m., Slack announced it on its status page. File uploads and message editing were among the services that were having problems, according to ET. Although some services had improved, Slack said it was still looking into issues with file uploads two hours after the outage was first reported.

Amazon's Third Outage

The disruption came just two weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced another massive outage that impacted Amazon Prime, Roblox, Disney+, Netflix, and Ring.

Slack's status post reads that they are concentrating on getting everything back to normal as quickly as they can. They apologized for the inconvenience to its users.

Furthermore, NordVPN, a virtual private network operator, stated it was also experiencing troubles as a result of the AWS outage. NordVPN stated that AWS is currently experiencing challenges. With that, connectivity to their website may be impacted for the time being, the provider said in a tweet.

As recalled, Amazon Web Services experienced a massive outage earlier this month, affecting sites such as Venmo, DoorDash, and Spotify. According to published accounts, AWS experienced a second outage a week later, affecting sites such as Facebook and Hulu.

Amazon Web Services

The outage follows an Amazon outage earlier this month that knocked several companies and services offline for many hours. According to New York Post, last week, the cloud-computing unit experienced a second outage, but this time it was significantly shorter.

The largest cloud computing service in the United States is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Customers, including many large corporations, can rent compute, storage, and network capabilities through the service. As the epidemic has driven people to work from home, businesses and consumers have become increasingly reliant on cloud computing services.