Amazon’s cloud service outage affects publishing, other sites

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon, experienced an outage on Tuesday that affected publishers including Cox Media Group, The Associated Press and others.

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That left news organizations in the lurch, unable to update sites as former President Donald Trump appeared in a federal court in Miami, according to the AP.

According to Amazon’s AWS Health Dashboard, the company began investigating reports of “increased error rates and latencies” on the east coast of the U.S. at about 3:08 p.m. EDT. Several sites had already been experiencing issues.

Amazon added that the root cause of the problem was “an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda.” That caused errors directly for some customers and indirectly through the use of other AWS services.

AWS Lambda allows customers to run code for different types of applications, according to the AP.

“You don’t realize how many eggs are in the Amazon Web Services basket until an outage takes out most of the systems you use day-to-day,” Kevin Montano, a photographer for a WNYT-TV in Albany, New York, tweeted Tuesday.

AWS’ customers include major companies such as Netflix, Deloitte and Comcast, according to The Washington Post.

Amazon said it was experiencing error rates for multiple AWS services in an availability zone based in Northern Virginia, the AP reported.

Patrick Neighorn, an Amazon spokesperson, declined to provide more details about the outage, according to the AP.

Other sites affected by the outage included Capital One, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, OkCupid, Amazon Music, Meetup, Character.ai, Alexa, Amazon, Ally Bank, Crunchy Roll and IMDb.

In a statement later Tuesday, the AWS Health Dashboard noted at 6:42 p.m. EDT that the “issue has been resolved,” and that all of the AWS services were “operating normally.”