AWS is down again – everything we know so far

Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, has suffered yet another outage. This is the fourth time in recent months the service has gone down.

According to data from outage tracking site DownDetector, the outage began at 15:00 GMT / 10:00 ET.

There’s nothing on the official AWS status page as yet, so it’s unclear precisely which services are affected, but we’ll be updating this blog with all the latest updates.

This is a developing story…

So far, the number of DownDetector reports is sitting at around 500, which is relatively low. For a major outage affecting multiple regions, for example, we’d expect a few thousand reports at least.

(Image credit: DownDetector)

It’s worth noting that Slack is also currently suffering an outage and it’s not impossible the two incidents are connected. When AWS went down late last year, it took a whole host of sites and services with it, Slack included.

Last time round, the AWS outage was caused by a loss of power in a single data center facility in the US, which caused a host of knock-on problems.

Amazon was quick to restore power to the affected facility, but faced network connectivity challenges that delayed the recovery.

This time, it appears the outage is on a smaller scale. There’s still nothing on the AWS status page and very little chatter on Twitter, including from official Amazon accounts.

Since there’s nothing on the website or Twitter feeds, we’ve sent a message to our contacts at AWS asking for further clarification. This may be a small outage, but it’s clear something is going on.

We’re still in the dark as to precisely what’s going on, but it’s worth noting that DownDetector is showing a drop-off in the number of reports over the last few minutes.

Does this suggest someone has pulled a few levers and tweaked a few dials to set the issues straight?

(Image credit: DownDetector)

Looks like some people are using the AWS and Slack outages as the perfect excuse for a quick powernap…