Amazon's Cloud Computing Service Experiences Regional Outage

Amazon Web Services, the tech behemoth's cloud computing division, experienced a wide-reaching outage Tuesday.

The issues left engineers unable to access certain tools and affected businesses, although the immediate scale was not clear. The Boston Globe and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority were among those tweeting that their websites were affected.

Amazon pointed to a publicly available AWS dashboard confirming the outage. As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, the company said many services were recovered and it was continuing to work on the issues, which were especially affecting customers using servers in Northern Virginia.

The Associated Press reported earlier that its ability to publish was affected as reporters were attempting to cover former president Donald Trump's Miami court appearance.

"You don't realize how many eggs are in the Amazon Web Services basket until an outage takes out most of the systems you use day-to-day," Kevin Montano, a photographer for a local NBC station in Albany, N.Y., tweeted Tuesday.

AWS provides cloud computing services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the web instead of running their own data centers. The division also sells machine learning tools and other technologies to its customers.

Other major AWS outages have happened, including in 2021. The year before, an outage hobbled companies including the Amazon-owned Ring security camera service, iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaner app, services from design technology firm Autodesk and the publishing systems of news outlets such as The Washington Post.

The cloud provider's customers include major companies such as Netflix, Deloitte and Comcast, as well as hundreds of start-ups and multiple government agencies. AWS brought in more than $21 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023, according to a company earnings statement.

Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Post. The Post's interim CEO and publisher, Patricia Stonesifer, sits on Amazon's board.