Amazon Cloud Outage Affects Major Websites and Streaming Apps

A major outage disrupted Amazon's cloud services on Tuesday, temporarily removing streaming platforms Netflix and Disney +, Robinhood, a wide range of apps, and Amazon.com Inc's e-commerce website as consumers shopped before Christmas.

"Many services have already recovered; however, we are working towards full recovery across services," Amazon said on its status dashboard. According to their social media pages, Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime, and robotic vacuum maker iRobot reported problems using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Robinhood commercial app and the Walt Disney (DIS.N) streaming service Disney + and Netflix also fell, according to Downdetector.com. "Netflix which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, appears to have lost 26% of its traffic," Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics firm Kentik, said. Amazon said the outage was related to network devices and tied to the application programming interface, or API, a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

Downdetector.com showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting problems with Amazon, including Prime Video and other services. The outage tracking website collects status reports from various sources, including user errors on its platform.

Users started reporting problems around 10:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday and the outage could have affected a more significant number of users. Amazon has experienced 27 outages in the past 12 months related to its services, according to the web tool reviewed by the ToolTester website.

In June, websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and the New York Times were hit by a widespread one-hour outage tied to the US-based content delivery network provider. Fastly Inc (FSLY.N), a smaller rival to AWS.