Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

The Independent's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn commission. 

Netflix, Reddit and Tinder all down during Amazon web service crash

User access to a number of popular websites was disturbed during the crash

Alice Harrold
Sunday 20 September 2015 18:30 BST
Comments
Amazon declined to appear in front of the TAXE committee (AFP)
Amazon declined to appear in front of the TAXE committee (AFP)

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

A server fault in Virginia is affecting most of the northeast of the US, and disrupting many popular websites including Netflix, Reddit and Tinder.

Amazon Web Services is a cloud service which powers web and mobile applications, and provides data processing and warehousing, storage, and archiving to websites all over the world.

The server failure has meant that some customer access to Product Hunt, Medium, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe, Pocket, Viber, and Amazon Echo amongst others has been stopped temporarily.

The last time AWS crashed was in 2013, when it suffered a similar outage that took services like Instagram, Airbnb and Vine offline.

The 2013 crash lasted for 40 minutes and Buzzfeed reported that the company lost about $1,104 in average net sales per second during that time.

"The Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world," the AWS website says.

The crash report states: "3:53 AM PDT We are investigating increased API error rates in the US-EAST-1 Region.

"4:04 AM PDT AWS Lambda is experiencing increased faults and latency in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are actively working on resolving the issue."

"5:30 AM PDT We can confirm increased API faults and elevated latencies in the US-EAST-1 Region and are working towards resolution."

"6:15 AM PDT We can confirm increased error rates for invoke API calls in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Just after 2pm BST, AWS reported that they identified the cause and are actively working to resolve the issue.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in