AWS Cloud Outage Takes Down Major Services

Run for the hills! Disaster has struck, as AWS cloud outage in the important region of datacenters in Virginia has taken down a number of major websites and services.

The cloud giant is, as of this writing, scrambling to fix the networking issue.

According to Amazon Web Services, its highly popular US East region had been dropping packets all morning due to unidentified connectivity problems with Direct Connect. This is the system that connects Amazon datacenters to other server warehouses and premises.

AWS first acknowledged the issue at around 10:30 AM Eastern Time, confirming that its engineers were working on the problem, but gave no estimates when the service might return.

This is what the company revealed on its status page:

“We continue to work towards resolving the increased packet loss impacting AWS Direct Connect connectivity to the US-EAST-1 Region. Direct Connect connections from the Equinix DC1 – DC6 & DC10 – DC12, Ashburn, VA and CoreSite VA1 & VA2, Reston, VA locations are affected by this issue.”

Sounds serious.

The outage has knocked down a number of internet services offline, starting with Amazon’s own Alexa virtual assistant.

Others reportedly seeing the effects of this disconnect include the Capital One bank, communications service Twilio, and developer hub Bitbucket. The latter of which has confirmed that the issue is at the AWS end.

We’ll just have to wait and see when order is restored. And hopefully, Amazon is able to provide a detailed breakdown of what went wrong with its usually stable and reliable cloud.

Stay tuned.