Amazon Web Services outage stalls sites and apps

Amazon’s US-East-1 servers, a major hub for the company’s cloud computing platform, shut down Tuesday morning. The company services governments, universities, and businesses, many of which reported network issues throughout the day. As of Tuesday evening, Amazon’s dashboard said it “executed a mitigation” that is restoring the servers, but it did not provide an estimated time for full recovery. The company does not suspect foul play.

What was affected? Passengers could not book or change flights through Delta Air Lines. Disney+ and Netflix usage also plummeted. Several news outlets such as the Associated Press, NBC, and NPR were affected, along with Venmo and Robinhood. The federal government did not say whether the outage hampered its services but did confirm it is in communication with Amazon. Scanning apps for deliveries and warehouse operations placed a number of Amazon workers on standby on Tuesday. A company memo instructed drivers and workers to stop, go to a safe location, and wait for the issue to resolve before resuming deliveries.

Dig deeper: Listen to Bonnie Pritchett’s report about hiring surges at companies like Amazon on The World and Everything in It podcast.