Amazon Webs Servers Crash Hard and Take Disney+ and Others Down With Them

By Commentary
Note: This article may contain commentary or the author's opinion.

You may or may not have been affected by the great AWS (Amazon Web Servers) outage of December 7th, 2021, but thousands have; including a few large websites and their company’s online services. Several companies including Disney+, Amazon Prime, Amazon Music, Amazon’s Alexa, Ring, and dozens of others have reported outages.

The ability to log on and use the various servers listed above has been mostly accessible to the majority of users across the United States depending on what they are trying to get into. For instance, Disney+ was being affected for a while, but it seems to be back up in some areas. Canvas, a site used by colleges and other educational institutions all over the country has been incredibly slow to open or simply won’t load at all. Many are reporting the red logo spinning endlessly (such as in my case), or on their computer they are getting a “bad gateway error”.

This couldn’t come at a more horrible time for students and faculty as finals have begun this week!

As of the writing of this article, the outage has been going on for several hours and there is currently no ETA on when it will be fully restored. Many are doubting whether or not this was a simple outage or if something more sinister is taking place, such as some kind of cyber-attack by hackers or other enemies maybe foreign or domestic.

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1468278905584951309?s=20

Below is another tweet that shows just a few of the sites affected by the outage.

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So, what does Amazon claim is the cause? According to Forbes, AWS is having “an impairment of several network devices” and though there are “some signs of recovery, the company “do not have an ETA for full recovery.” 

“”We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard, adding that it has identified the cause and was working to resolve the issue.”

Forbes also goes on to say that there are at least 48 different sites that are suffering thanks to the impairments. These outages are not cheap, and if you recall, the one for Facebook back in October of this year cost over $100 million in revenue!

Amazon Web Services has experienced this kind of thing before. Remember back in November 2020? Insider reported that a similar issue took down the Services and stemmed from the same region as the one going on today. Amazon themselves posted what happened in a highly detailed summary for the November 25th, 2020 outage that “hobbled” many businesses both small and large.

While many are laughing and poking fun of the incident, it’s interesting to see just how much of our day-to-day routines can be altered by an outage of this magnitude.

Below a tweet points out that some McDonald’s kiosks rely on the same consoles that have gone down.

Are you aware of how many of your household items might be running on Amazon Web Services, or on the internet at all?

These men below just realized they can’t even vacuum their houses thanks to the outage.

https://twitter.com/vpisteve/status/1468301582382952456?s=20

Another tweeter has just discovered their thermostat requires the internet to be adjusted!

Others have taken to reminding people why it’s best not to put all our eggs in one basket…

https://twitter.com/LL_CoolBeans/status/1468326944332681219?s=20

Good luck surfing out there!

 

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