Amazon Web Services Hit by Outage -- Update

By Micah Maidenberg 

Amazon.com Inc. grappled with an hourslong outage tied to its enormous cloud-computing operation that affected many businesses, forcing them to warn their customers about product disruptions

At 3:15 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, Amazon Web Services said in a post to its website it was continuing to "work towards recovery" of an issue with a data-software product and related services covering its region for the eastern part of the U.S.

The situation was improving, but the company said it expected a "full recovery to still take up to a few hours," according to the post.

Businesses warned customers on Twitter that their products were facing problems due to the outage.

Roku Inc., behind its namesake streaming devices, said it had been affected by the outage. A Roku spokeswoman said users could still stream content. Insteon, which sells products for homes like thermostats and fan controllers, said in a tweet that Alexa voice commands for one of its hub systems may fail due to the outage.

The Chicago Tribune said in a tweet it would post news updates to social-media sites because it is "experiencing intermittent issues with our website and publishing system because of the AWS outage." Operations at The Wall Street Journal were affected.

Cloud-computing services have become more pivotal during the coronavirus pandemic as many companies have embraced remote hardware and software services to allow employees to work from home.

Amazon, on its cloud-computer site, had earlier said a programming interface for its Kinesis Data Streams product was impaired. As a result, customers weren't able to read or write data tied to its streams. Kinesis is able to capture gigabytes of data each second from websites, financial transactions, social-media feeds and other digital locations, according to the company.

"We are working toward resolution," a spokeswoman said.

Some of the problems with the cloud-based software were tied to Northern Virginia, according to the Amazon Web Services website.

Amazon has long been the leader in the business of renting out cloud-computing infrastructure. More recently, it has faced fresh challenges from Microsoft Corp., as well as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Oracle Corp.

Microsoft and Google in recent months also have suffered issues with their cloud services.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 25, 2020 17:46 ET (22:46 GMT)

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