Amazon 'plans to regroup today' and deal with huge backlog that delayed deliveries up to 48 hours and threatens to ruin Christmas after AWS outage wreaked havoc on drivers and warehouses
Amazon is battling to regroup after a major cloud services outage disrupted the company's shipping operations on Tuesday, threatening to create lasting logjams during the Christmas season.
The roughly eight-hour Amazon Web Services outage on Tuesday shut down communications between the e-commerce giant and the fleet of thousands of drivers it relies on, preventing drivers from getting route assignments or packages, according to Bloomberg.
The disruption hit the app Amazon uses to communicate with the network of independent contractors who carry out much of its last-mile shipping, leaving vans that were supposed to be on the road idle, sources told the outlet.
The outage came during the company's crucial and busy Christmas shopping season, and could potentially create persistent logjams at a time where there is already a critical crunch on the supply chain.
Some customers who were expecting packages on Tuesday were notified that delivery would be delayed for one to two days, according to complaints on social media.
Amazon and its delivery partners are said to be regrouping on Wednesday in an attempt to prevent the disruption from spiraling out of control.
An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Wednesday morning.
Amazon is battling to regroup after a major cloud services outage reportedly disrupted the company's shipping operations on Tuesday, threatening to create lasting logjams during the crucial Christmas season
The outage came during the company's crucial and busy Christmas shopping season, and could potentially create persistent logjams at a time where there is already a critical crunch on the supply chain
Amazon went down across the globe, frustrating thousands of users who are trying to purchase Christmas gifts. DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows North America, parts of Europe and Asia are all experiencing issues
The outage also disrupted operations for independent sellers who use the company's marketplace to sell goods
The AWS outage began at around 10am ET and had widespread impacts. The company said by 6pm that the issue was mostly resolved, and at 7.30pm the network device issue had been fully resolved, with Amazon adding that it was 'working towards recovery of any impaired services.'
The company said that connections to one of its most crucial server systems were disrupted by a technical error and insisted there was no malicious interference from hackers.
'The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices,' the company said in a statement.
Many customers who were expecting packages on Tuesday were notified of a delay of one to two days
The incident at Amazon Web Services mostly affected the eastern U.S., but still impacted everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services to Amazon's own massive e-commerce operation.
That included The Associated Press, whose publishing system was inoperable for much of the day, greatly limiting its ability to publish its news report.
Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong. In fact, the company limited its communications Tuesday to terse technical explanations on an AWS dashboard and a brief statement delivered via spokesperson Richard Rocha that acknowledged the outage had affected Amazon's own warehouse and delivery operation but said the company was 'working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.'
Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had 'mitigated' the underlying problem responsible for the outage, which it did not describe. It took some affected companies hours more to thoroughly check their systems and restart their own services.
Amazon Web Services was formerly run by Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO in July.
The cloud-service operation is a huge profit center for Amazon. It holds roughly a third of the $152 billion market for cloud services, according to a report by Synergy Research - a larger share than its closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, combined.
Complaints piled up by the thousands following the technical disruption to Amazon's delivery operations
Amazon Web Services was formerly run by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (above), who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO in July
As well as the US - the Amazon outage has affected parts of the United Kingdom, Europe, Pakistan, India and Asia
Amazon stock briefly dipped on Tuesday but fully recovered its losses as seen in this five-day view of the share price, suggesting that investors do not anticipate the outage will have a long-term impact on the company's profits
To technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud, the AWS outage highlights how much Big Tech has warped the internet, which was originally designed as a distributed and decentralized network intended to survive mass disasters such as nuclear attack.
'When we put everything in one place, be it Amazon´s cloud or Facebook's monolith, we're violating that fundamental principle,' said Malamud, who developed the internet's first radio station and later put a vital U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database online.
'We saw that when Facebook became the instrument of a massive disinformation campaign, we just saw that today with the Amazon failure.'
Widespread and often lengthy outages resulting from single-point failures appear increasingly common. In June, the behind-the-scenes content distributor Fastly suffered a failure that briefly took down dozens of major internet sites including CNN, The New York Times and Britain's government home page.
Then in October, Facebook - now known as Meta Platforms - blamed a 'faulty configuration change' for an hours-long worldwide outage that took down Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to its titular platform.
This time, problems began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm. Netflix was one of the more prominent names affected; Kentik saw a 26 percent drop in traffic to the streaming service.
Customers trying to book or change trips with Delta Air Lines had trouble connecting to the airline. 'Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines,' said spokesperson Morgan Durrant.
The airline apologized and encouraged customers to use its website or mobile app instead.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to West Coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage.
Customers were still reporting outages to DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reports, more than three hours after they started. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there were no major disruptions to flights.
Packages move along a conveyor at the Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey in a file photo
An Amazon delivery driver carries boxes into a van outside of a distribution facility in Hawthorne, California in a file photo
Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin said the company's U.S. East Region for dealer services went down. The company has apps that access inventory data, monthly payment calculators, service bulletins and other items. More than 20 apps were affected.
Also according to DownDetector, people trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ reported issues. The McDonald´s app was also down. But the airlines American, United, Alaska and JetBlue were unaffected.
Madory said he saw no reason to suspect nefarious activity. He said the recent cluster of major outages reflects how complex the networking industry has become.
'More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,' he said. 'This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity but are very impactful when they happen.'
It was unclear how, or whether, the outage was affecting the federal government.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an email response to questions that it was working with Amazon 'to understand any potential impacts this outage may have for federal agencies or other partners.'
No comments