Amazon Web Services (AWS), the web-hosting service that powers, well, most everything online suffered its third outage this month on Wednesday morning, bringing giant chunks of the web crashing down with it. Services like Coinbase, Slack, and the Epic Games store have all had user reports pouring in since roughly 7 am ET, according to DownDetector, which records user reports of outages.
According to the AWS status page, these issues could be tied back to a single data centre in West Virginia that lost power in the wee hours of the morning. The company confirmed that one of its data centres within the “single Availability Zone” lost power at 7:01 am this morning, though it says that the issue seems to be resolved as of about half an hour later.
That said, don’t be surprised if your service of choice isn’t back at 100% just yet. “While all services are starting to see meaningful recovery, services which were hosting endpoints within the affected data centre — such as single-AZ RDS databases, ElastiCache, etc. — would have seen impact during the event, but are starting to see recovery now,” the page reads. And considering how DownDetector reports were still trickling in a bit after 9 am ET, the recovery appears to be ongoing at the time of publication.
It’s unclear why AWS has been having hiccups multiple times this month. Two weeks ago, the service suffered a major outage that took down everything from dating apps to streaming services and even knocked Amazon’s own logistics networks offline for a short period of time. Then, in the middle of this month, AWS suffered another outage, this time due to an unnamed “internet connectivity” issue.
While time around, AWS did disclose that a loss of power was the culprit, it’s still a frustrating reminder of what can happen when a single company controls a massive amount of our tech infrastructure.