Amazon Web Services Outage: 'Issues Resolved,' Company Says

ACROSS AMERICA — Amazon Web Services is back online following a widespread outage on Wednesday, according to the company's service health dashboard. Wednesday's outage was the second reported in just over a week.

AWS is a widely used cloud computing technology used by retail businesses and third-party online services. It wasn't immediately known which websites were affected by Wednesday's outage.

Shortly after 8 a.m. PT, the company said it had identified the cause of the outage and was investigating internet connectivity in the US-WEST region. By 8:30 a.m., the company said all issues had been resolved.

Wednesday's outage followed one on Dec. 7 that knocked out cloud services for more than 1 million small and mid-sized U.S. companies. Three days later, AWS published an explanation for the hours-long outage.

"An automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large" number of clients inside the internal network," the company wrote in a post on its website.

As a result, devices connecting an internal Amazon network and the AWS network became overloaded.