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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Malcolm McMillan

AWS went down, taking parts of the Internet with it — what we know

Close up of AWS sign at their offices in SOMA district

While many people think of Amazon as a great place to score some deals, it also owns Amazon Web Services. This server system hosts a significant portion of the digital world, from Amazon Alexa devices to fast food apps and more.

Unfortunately, that means when AWS goes down lots of services suffer. And that's exactly what happened today (June 7) when, according to several outlets and Down Detector, a website that tracks real-time outage information, AWS was hit with a major outage.  The Verge reported that the issue appears to be tied to an issue with US-EAST-1 region that started at around 3 p.m. ET. 

A look at the AWS Health Dashboard confirmed that the company's Northern Virginia servers experienced increased error rates and latency issues, which caused severe degradation that may help explain why some of your favorite services weren't working for a little while.

Update: As of 6:37 p.m. ET, AWS says "the issue has been resolved and all AWS Services are operating normally."

What services powered by AWS went down

As of writing, here are all the services that were down or experiencing some problems according to Down Detector. It appears Microsoft Azure also experienced some issues, which may be related.

  • Amazon Web Services
  • McDonald's app
  • Amazon
  • Southwest
  • Amazon Alexa
  • Pluto TV
  • Ally
  • Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Seige
  • Microsoft 365
  • Destiny
  • FIFA
  • Instagram
  • IMDb
  • VRChat
  • Nike Plus
  • Delta Air Lines
  • TikTok
  • Fortnite
  • Hinge
  • Overwatch 2

The official AWS Service Health Dashboard offers up-to-date intel on what's happening, and throughout the outage it gave updates. Shortly after 6 PM ET Tuesday (June 7) it reported that all issues had been resolved.

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