Amazon Web Services seeing widespread outages, impacting major websites: reports – National | Globalnews.ca

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is facing a major outage that’s impacting websites and services for universities, governments and companies, according to The Associated Press.

The Associated Press is also impacted by the outage, they said in a tweet. Downdetector — a website that tracks outages — showed more than 14,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon.

“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.

This would be the third outage for the company this year.

AWS provides servers, storage, email and a number of other services to these platforms — effectively keeping large parts of the internet running. The outage is impacting user access to a wide variety of platforms.

Amazon’s web services are among the most widely used, including by the Canadian federal government. Some of the major websites that users reported as experiencing outages Tuesday include the popular streaming service Disney+, the messaging platform Slack, the digital wallet service Venmo and the stock trading service Robinhood.

While the cloud service was down, the internet’s appetite for memes was not. Users quickly took to Twitter to share their unfiltered feelings about the massive outage.

Some looked on the bright side of the outage, framing it as a potential savings opportunity ahead of the holidays.

Others poked fun at the company itself.

— with files from Reuters, The Associated Press