Amazon announces progress after an outage disrupted sites across the internet

By Vanessa Romo,

Barbara Campbell

Published December 7, 2021 at 1:30 PM CST

Amazon drivers cheer as they go back to their their delivery vans, with systems back online at the Amazon Delivery Station in Rosemead, Calif. Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage. The company provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and companies.

Updated December 7, 2021 at 8:00 PM ET

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of Amazon, reports its "network device issues [are]resolved" after suffering a major outage on Tuesday, leaving thousands of users unable to access huge portions of the internet, including a broad range of apps.

The outage, which caused slow loading or access failures, began at around 11 a.m. ET and was largely concentrated along the East Coast, according to the company.

It explained, "We are seeing impact to multiple [Amazon Web Services] APIs [application programming interfaces] in the US-EAST-1 Region."

"We are now working towards recovery of any impaired services," an Amazon update said later.

AWS is a cloud computing service that allows companies to rent computing, storage and network capabilities, which is why the outage has shut down or slowed access to such a wide variety of sites and apps across the internet.

Users reported problems logging on to not just Amazon's products — Amazon.com, Prime Video, Alexa AI and Kindle — but also Netflix, Venmo, Disney+, Ring, Roku, Duolingo, Chime, Fidelity Investments and NPR's own news apps.

Editor's note: Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters.