• Amazon Web Services goes down and with it a host of sites and services

    Many websites and services you rely on run on Amazon Web Services, and when it goes down, so do they.



    December 7th, 2021 is a day that will annoy many Amazon Web Services (AWS) users. And, it will also annoy many more people who didn't realize until today that Disney+, Venmo, and Robinhood all rely on AWS.

    The problem? According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard:

    We are seeing an impact on multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates. We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery.

    So, we should be back to business as usual soon.
    The problem first manifested at about 10:45 AM Eastern Time. It got its start in the major US East 1 AWS region hosted in Virginia.

    It may have been sparked there, but the problems showed up across AWS. Internet administrators reported that there were problems with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), a web service that securely controls access to AWS resources, globally. In addition AWS customer service was down. So, even if your service or site wasn't at US East 1, you could still feel the effects.

    Fortunately, according to DownDetector results, AWS seems to have a handle on the problem. In a few hours, all should be back to normal.