Citing API and console issues in its US-EAST-1 Region, AWS says it's identified a root cause and, at last check, was 'starting to see some signs of recovery.'

Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor

December 7, 2021

3 Min Read
AWS outage cuts down swaths of the Internet

Amazon Web Services outages took several major services offline Tuesday. The cloud giant announced this afternoon that it was working to resolve the issue and starting to see "some signs of recovery."

Per an earlier AWS post to its health services dashboard, the company noted that it was "investigating increased error rates for the AWS Management Console" and "experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery."

In an updated post as of 1:17 p.m. ET today, AWS noted that the issue is also "affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates." AWS added that it is "starting to see some signs of recovery," but did not yet know when to expect a full recovery.

The US East 1 AWS region is hosted in Virginia.

Update: AWS updated its dashboard at 2:26 p.m. ET to note that services impacted by the issue include EC2, Connect, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena, Timestream, and Chime and other AWS Services in US-EAST-1. "The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices in the US-EAST-1 Region," AWS added. "We are pursuing multiple mitigation paths in parallel, and have seen some signs of recovery, but we do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time. Root logins for consoles in all AWS regions are affected by this issue, however customers can login to consoles other than US-EAST-1 by using an IAM role for authentication."

The outage has impacted swaths of the Internet, taking down or slowing down popular services such as Amazon's own Prime Video service and Alexa platform, as well as Disney+ and Venmo. According to DownDetector, AWS customers reported issues with the AWS website, console and login, with outage instances peaking this morning at about 11,360.

AWS users were also expressing their frustration on Twitter.

The AWS issue also spread its tentacles to this week's UBS Global TMT Virtual Conference. Of note, today's scheduled discussion with Charter Communications Chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge has been moved to Wednesday, December 8:

Figure 1: (Image source: UBS) (Image source: UBS)

Today's outage comes about as mobile operators and telcos, including Verizon, Bell Canada and Dish Network, become increasingly reliant on AWS, either at the core or at the edge.

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Jeff Baumgartner

Senior Editor, Light Reading

Jeff Baumgartner is a Senior Editor for Light Reading and is responsible for the day-to-day news coverage and analysis of the cable and video sectors. Follow him on X and LinkedIn.

Baumgartner also served as Site Editor for Light Reading Cable from 2007-2013. In between his two stints at Light Reading, he led tech coverage for Multichannel News and was a regular contributor to Broadcasting + Cable. Baumgartner was named to the 2018 class of the Cable TV Pioneers.

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