Amazon says service interruption resolved and operations restored

The brief disruption was a result of an issue with the company’s Lambda service, a product that spins up computing power in response to events

AWS is the world’s largest seller of on-demand computing power and software services, and disruptions can create headaches for a range of companies and industries. AP

Amazon’s cloud-computing arm said it resolved a problem that had disrupted several companies and organisations, including Southwest Airlines and New York’s transit agency.

Amazon Web Services are now “operating normally,” according to its status page on Tuesday evening.

The company said it began investigating “increased error rates and latencies” in one of its data centre clusters shortly after 3pm New York time.

The failures affected the company’s US-East-1 region, which is centred in northern Virginia and is Amazon’s most important data centre hub.

AWS is the world’s largest seller of on-demand computing power and software services, which it delivers from a network of vast server farms. That means its disruptions can ripple across the internet, creating headaches for a range of companies and industries.

The Verge news site, for instance, said Tuesday that the disruption left it unable to update its home page.

On Twitter, technologists reported not being able to log into the AWS console, the portal they use to manage AWS services. And the MTA took to the social media site to report that train service information on its website and MYmta app were unavailable because of the AWS service interruption.

Viktor Pali, co-founder of Hungary-based document collaboration start-up Craft Docs, said in a LinkedIn message that the disruption temporarily took down the company’s web app and shared documents, although users on smartphone applications still had access to the software.

Mr Pali said the service interruption appeared to be the most severe for AWS since a December 2021 disruption that took down websites, Roomba vacuums and Amazon’s own delivery network software.

AWS’s status page reported that Tuesday’s failures stemmed from an issue with the company’s Lambda service, a product that spins up computing power in response to events. Dozens of other AWS services were affected, the company said.

In an update to its status page posted at 6.42pm in New York, the company said “the issue has been resolved”.