Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon’s crucial web services business AWS is experiencing problems today, with issues affecting services like Slack, Imgur, and the Epic Games store for some users. It’s not looking good if you’re working from home, with some Slack users unable to view or upload images, and work management tool Asana also hit by the outages.
In an incident update, Slack said its services are “experiencing issues with file uploads, message editing, and other services.” Asana says the problems constitute a “major outage,” with “many of our users unable to access Asana.” Epic Games Store said “Internet services outages” are “affecting logins, library, purchases, etc.”
It’s the third time in as many weeks that problems with AWS have had a significant effect on online services. Two incidents earlier this month involving AWS ended up knocking out a huge array of platforms and products, taking out streaming sites like Netflix and Disney Plus as well as smart home devices like security cameras from Ring and Wyze.
Today’s outages seem less widespread but still notable, with some users unable to access services entirely and others merely experiencing intermittent faults. DownDetector.com shows reports of issues with the platforms mentioned above, as well as news aggregator Flipboard, online learning site Udemy, dating app Grindr, streaming service Hulu, and IoT services from Honeywell, Life360, and Samsung’s SmartThings.
The official AWS service health dashboard said at 4:35AM PST that the company was “investigating increased EC2 launch failures and networking connectivity issues for some instances in a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region,” before updating at 5:01AM PST to confirm that power loss has affected “a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
“Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone, or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so,” notes AWS in an update statement. “We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center.”
Update Wednesday, December 22nd, 08:36AM ET: Updated story to add responses from affected services.