AWS Outage Interrupts Web Service for Spotify, Square And Others

An Amazon Web Services outage affected the digital presence and operations of dozens of companies Wednesday (Nov 25) as one of the subsystems of the massive web operations platform failed.

The support page for Amazon Web Services’ status page said it was experiencing problems with Kinesis, its service that processes large streams of data, causing “increased error rates” for a number of websites. The outage also impacted its ability to post updates to the status page so ascertaining the scope of the problem was difficult as of mid-afternoon.

“We continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region,” the notice stated, adding that the issue appeared to be affecting the “subsystem” responsible for handling incoming requests. “The team has identified the root cause and is working on resolving the issue affecting this subsystem,” the notice said.

According to the site DownDetector, the outage has spread to several high-profile sites including Vonage, Reddit, iTunes, GrubHub, Southern California Edison, Square, Chime, Fidelity, Roku, Alexa and Spotfiy.  CNBC said other companies and services affected include Autodesk, Affirm, Target’s Shipt delivery service and the site operated by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Kinesis, as described on the AWS site is “a massively scalable and durable real-time data streaming service. KDS can continuously capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources such as website clickstreams, database event streams, financial transactions, social media feeds, IT logs, and location-tracking events. The data collected is available in milliseconds to enable real-time analytics use cases such as real-time dashboards, real-time anomaly detection, dynamic pricing, and more.”

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