Alexa Lost her Voice !

9906841091?profile=RESIZE_400xA major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network had severely disrupted services at a wide range of US companies beginning on 07 December 2021.  Amazon and some other services including Prime Video and Alexa were affected by computer problems.   Thousands of users in the United States have reported problems on the outage tracking website Downdetector.  There are reports in the US that customers of McDonald's, Netflix, Disney, and several other AWS clients, are had issues too.

Downdetector https://downdetector.com is an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services.  The information that is provided by the site is based upon user outage reports, which are collected from various sources, including the comment section of each website's page on Downdetector and Twitter.  A map is also shown with the locations of the outage reports, and a list of cities with the corresponding number of reports is shown above the map. Downdetector is available in 45 countries, with a different site for each country.

This is just the latest indication of how concentrated the business of keeping the Internet running has become.  Amazon said the outage was most likely due to problems related to Application Programming Interface (API) software, a set of protocols for building and integrating application software, Reuters reported.  “We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-East-1 Region,” AWS said in a report on its service health dashboard, adding that it had identified the cause.

The company added that not all regions of the world had experienced problems and reports suggest that the biggest disruption for customers is being seen on the US east coast.   By late afternoon the outage appeared to be partially resolved, with the company saying that it was “working towards full recovery.  With the network device issues resolved, we are now working towards recovery of any impaired services,” the company said on the dashboard.  Amazon subsequently said that it had identified the cause and has "seen some signs of recovery," but gave no timescale for a solution.

Downdetector showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting problems with Amazon.  It tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.[1]

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing arm, which provides services to governments, companies and universities, was also affected. On the Amazon shopping website, many users reported just a slow loading of pages rather than an inability to use the service.  Services including Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages and Twitter.  "A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App," iRobot wrote on its website.  Ring also said it was working to solve the issues.

It is the third outage for Amazon this year.  Last June users experienced a brief outage on Amazon platforms, including Alexa and Prime Video.  That incident also hit several other companies, including Shopify, PayPal and the news group CNN.  In July the e-commerce giant experienced disruption of its online stores service, which lasted for nearly two hours and affected almost 40,000 users.

The outage problems at AWS, the biggest cloud computing company in the world, could have a rippling effect because of the large number of corporate customers, as well as critical government organizations in defense and intelligence.

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[1] https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/amazon-cloud-outage-affects-major-customers-6011.html

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