Amazon down: web service interruption hits Prime, Roku, Ring doorbells and other sites

Thousands of US users were affected by the downtime that also knocked out Netflix and Disney+

More than 24,000 US users reported trouble accessing Amazon's streaming services. Reuters

A major interruption hit Amazon's cloud services on Tuesday, temporarily knocking out streaming platforms Netflix and Disney+, Robinhood, a wide range of apps and Amazon's e-commerce website as consumers shopped before Christmas.

"Many services have already recovered. However, we are working towards full recovery across services," Amazon said on its status dashboard.

Amazon said the service interruption was probably due to issues related to application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.

"We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region," Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard. It said it had identified the cause.

Tracking website Downdetector showed more than 24,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Amazon. It tracks interruptions by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Other services including Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot were also facing issues according to their social media pages.

Trading app Robinhood and Walt Disney's streaming service Disney+ and Netflix were also down, according to Downdetector.

"Netflix, which runs nearly all of its infrastructure on AWS, appears to have lost 26 per cent of its traffic," Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at analytics company Kentik, said to Reuters.

Ring said it was aware of the issue and working to resolve it.

Amazon has experienced 27 service interruptions over the past 12 months related to its services, according to web tool reviewing website ToolTester.