Amazon Web Services outage leads to cancellation of parking tickets, shuts down local services in Boston

In Boston, the outage caused a range of disruptions. The city’s transportation department said its ParkBoston app was down and could not be used to pay for parking. The department posted on Twitter that it would not ticket vehicles at meters that had not been paid for, a rare reprieve for drivers.

The local public bicycle-share program, Bluebikes, was also affected and warned that “users may see some delays and errors in trying to rent bikes.”

At Boston College, a business student tweeted that the Canvas website for students and faculty was down, keeping her from submitting an assignment.

A Jamaica Plain resident commented that the outage affected his Alexa device at home, forcing him to “turn on my lights with a switch now like some kind of barbarian.”

The outage also affected news organizations, including The Associated Press, which announced the outage in a tweet just past noon. The Boston Globe was unable to publish news stories online from about 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm, told the Associated Press that problems began on the East Coast midmorning.

“AWS is the biggest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts to many popular websites and other internet services,” he said.

Customers were affected while trying to access Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, Disney+, and the McDonald’s app, according to the AP.