Amazon Web Services went down for a long stretch yesterday, big ripple impact

Richard Lawler, The Verge:

People started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET, and just after 6PM ET the AWS Status showed “Many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services.”

That’s a pretty long stretch of downtime.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Among the services that reported issues as a result of the outage were Disney’s streaming subscription service, Disney+, Netflix, Slack, Ticketmaster, stock trading app Robinhood, and Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S.

CoinBase! If you’ve built a dependency on CoinBase for your currency transactions, your money was down most of yesterday.

The outage also brought down critical tools used inside Amazon. Warehouse and delivery workers, along with drivers for Amazon’s Flex service, reported on Reddit that they couldn’t access the Flex app or the AtoZ app, making it impossible to scan packages or access delivery routes.

Late last night, I got an email telling me a package was just delivered. I went out and checked, no package. No doorbell notification either. Then I put two and two together. I got a package late morning, right around the time the outage started, but did not get a notification. It took all day for the infrastructure to catch up, to notify me about a package delivered more than 10 hours earlier.

This dependence on AWS is a single point of failure, never a good thing.