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AWS appears to be down, and it's taken popular services like Ring smart-home systems, Netflix, and Disney+ with it

Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Tuesday.
Sopa Images
  • Amazon's web-hosting subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, was experiencing major issues on Tuesday.
  • The outage appeared to affect major streaming services including Disney+ and Netflix.
  • Amazon said it was "investigating increased error rates."

Amazon's web-hosting subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, suffered a major outage on Tuesday morning.

Reports on the website Down Detector indicated widespread issues with AWS that affected a variety of services that depend on its servers to operate, such as Netflix, Disney+, Tinder, and Roku.

Other digital services, from the crypto-trading service Coinbase to the fast-casual restaurant chain Sweetgreen, were also experiencing outages as a result of AWS issues. Additionally, some major online games including "Valorant" and "League of Legends" appeared to be experiencing issues.

Amazon confirmed the outage and said on the AWS status page that it was "investigating increased error rates for the AWS Management Console." By Tuesday afternoon, Amazon had yet to fix the issue. "While we have observed some early signs of recovery," the company said, "we do not have an ETA for full recovery."

But by Tuesday evening, Amazon said things were beginning to return to normal. In short: Things weren't back to normal, but they were getting better.

A message posted to its AWS service portal said the company had, "mitigated the underlying issue," and it was, "seeing improvement in availability across most AWS services."

Amazon also said the outage was regional, applying to "US-EAST-1 Region" servers, which are housed in Virginia. Amazon later said it had discovered what was causing issues and was "actively working towards recovering."

Beyond third-party services, the outage caused major issues for Amazon's Ring smart-home systems, Alexa speakers, and Prime music- and video-streaming services.

Ring owners on social media detailed the kinds of issues they were experiencing, saying their doorbells weren't working or that they'd lost a video feed used for monitoring infants during naptime.

"Eek, just in time for my newly-in-beds triplet toddlers' nap," one person said. "Now I have no idea what they're doing up there."

AWS supports huge sections of the internet, and any outages — such as one in November 2020 — have ripple effects that can cause dozens of services to go down.

Got a tip? Contact Insider senior correspondent Ben Gilbert via email (bgilbert@businessinsider.com), or Twitter DM (@realbengilbert). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by email only, please.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

Check out: Personal Finance Insider's review of Coinbase.