Amazon Crash Sparks Internet Outages, Delivery Issues Across CA

CALIFORNIA — A massive outage darkened several internet-connected services in California that use Amazon's web services for much of Tuesday. The service interruption also caused issues for Amazon warehouse and delivery workers throughout the state.

Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage. Shortly thereafter, it reported that “many services have already recovered” but noted that others were still working toward full recovery.

Issues with Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services — a cloud-based service that small-and mid-size companies use to rent data storage and processing capabilities — spurred the outage, according to Downdetector.

The issue primarily affected Amazon web services in the eastern U.S., it said. Problems began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm -- among them, Amazon’s own e-commerce operations.

Meanwhile, Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers said the outage compromised the company's delivery system. The Flex and Dolphin apps, used for delivery operations, where both down on Tuesday.

Amazon offered sparse details about the crash, which was affecting platforms such as Instacart, Netflix, Dropbox, Spectrum, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, Disney+, and several others, according to Downdetector.

Kentik saw a 26 percent drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage.

Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines had trouble connecting to its online system. But the airlines American, United, Alaska and JetBlue were unaffected.

Around 12:30 p.m. the company determined the root cause of the outage was "an impairment of several network devices," according to its AWS health dashboard.

By the late afternoon, large swaths of the web were still down.

Madory said he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious, adding that a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved.

"More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration," Madory said. "This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen."

It was unclear how the outage was affecting the federal government, if at all. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email response to questions from the Associated Press that it was working with Amazon "to understand any potential impacts this outage may have for federal agencies or other partners."

Amazon is the world’s largest provider of cloud-computing services, The Washington Post reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.