On Monday, online retail giant Amazon experienced multiple outages starting at around 1 pm EST.
Amazon has more or less resolved the outages now, but they lasted about two hours. During that time, people reported more than 11,000 incidents they had with the site, according to outage tracking website Downdetector and reported by Reuters.
In December 2021, there was a massive outage that disrupted Amazon’s cloud services and affected several websites. Some of them included Amazon itself, Netflix, Disney+, Robinhood and other apps. Other services that used AWS, such as Amazon’s Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime, and vacuum maker iRobot, also suffered outages.
has reached out to Amazon for comment on the outage and we will update this story if and when we receive a response from the company.
Analysis: This outage indicates a larger problem
It appears that these site outages are having a bigger effect on consumers and site users in general in recent years.
Years ago, when a site or service went down, only that site or service was affected. But with most of the internet being owned or tied to a single entity like Amazon Web Services (AWS), a service outage can wipe out many seemingly unrelated websites and applications.
An AWS outage in December of last year proved just how crippling an outage to Amazon’s cloud service could be to the rest of the internet, even for a single day.
It’s certainly a major issue, and one that will have a more severe impact as cloud service giants like Amazon consolidate more of the market at fewer points of failure.
