Amazon Web Service outage takes down major apps and sites

At least three news sites are among those impacted by the AWS outage.

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Rae Hodge was a senior editor at CNET. She led CNET's coverage of privacy and cybersecurity tools from July 2019 to January 2023. As a data-driven investigative journalist on the software and services team, she reviewed VPNs, password managers, antivirus software, anti-surveillance methods and ethics in tech. Prior to joining CNET in 2019, Rae spent nearly a decade covering politics and protests for the AP, NPR, the BBC and other local and international outlets.

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Rae Hodge

Nov. 25, 2020 1:11 p.m. PT

Amazon Web Services powers big players on the web.

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A prolonged outage of Amazon Web Services -- a core component for a vast number of sites and apps -- brought part of the internet to a halt Wednesday, as reported earlier by The Verge. The affected sites include not only major players on the web like Flickr, Adobe Spark and Roku, but at least three news outlets.

The Tampa Bay Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Capital Gazette all took to Twitter to inform readers of their AWS-related downtime.

Wednesdays, right? Publishing on https://t.co/Qv9G6hjsS4 and our mobile app continues to be affected by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.
As we wait for a fix, we’ll continue to share interesting articles already published and any breaking news on here, Instagram & Facebook.
— Tampa Bay Times (@TB_Times) November 25, 2020

Publishing on https://t.co/vReoyd1Mv0 and our mobile app continue to be impacted by an ongoing Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. We're exploring workarounds and have plenty of interesting stories waiting to see the light of day.
How's everybody else's Wednesday going?
— The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) November 25, 2020

The Capital is experiencing intermittent issues with its website and publishing system because of the AWS outage. We will continue to post breaking news updates to our social channels.https://t.co/dKjxSDdOhe
— Capital Gazette (@capgaznews) November 25, 2020

The New York City Transit Authority said it too was affected, resulting in the inability to update a subway line alert. Other affected sites and services include Glassdoor, Spotify-owned Anchor, Getaround, iRobot and Pokemon Go.

In a statement to The Verge, Amazon said the culprit was its Kinesis Data Streams API, and said it was working on getting the problem fixed. "Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that's impacted some other AWS services," it said.

"For Kinesis Data Streams, the issue is affecting the subsystem that is responsible for handling incoming requests. The team has identified the root cause and is working on resolving the issue affecting this subsystem," it later added.

Amazon didn't immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.