Both Amazon and Microsoft’s widely-used cloud computing services appear to have suffered a major outage on Wednesday, causing problems with everything from airlines through banks to Xbox Live and Minecraft.
The crowdsourced error reporting site DownDetector showed huge spikes in errors for both services, as well as a host of other websites such as Google, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Starbucks, Costco, Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Amazon itself
“Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services,” the Seattle-based software giant said in a status update at 12:04 a.m. Eastern Time.
“We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure. Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.”
AWS’s online health dashboard showed no active issues as of 1:23 p.m. Eastern Time. The Independent has contacted Amazon for comment.
It is the second major internet outage in as many weeks, after AWS problems on October 20 brought some of the world’s biggest online services — including Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Duolingo and Canva — grinding to a halt.
Some people even woke up to find that their internet-enabled ‘smart’ beds had become uncomfortably warm or cold, or stuck at an incline, after the outage knocked out their connection to their mother company.
Microsoft’s outage on Wednesday is unfortunately timed because it comes just hours before the company’s third quarter earnings report.
AWS and Azure together control an estimated 55 percent of the cloud computing market, with AWS in the lead at 32 percent.
This story is developing and will be updated.
