Amazon and all of its services have failed throughout the world, affecting thousands of users and shutting down other popular websites that rely on Amazon’s cloud servers, such as Tinder and Venmo.
The platform, Amazon Music and Prime Video, Alexa, Ring, and Amazon Web Services, which provides a range of services for web apps, all began experiencing problems about 10:40 a.m. ET.
According to the Dailymail, Amazon officials stated that they had discovered the “root cause” of the problem and were attempting to rectify it.
The outage was most likely caused by issues with the application programming interface, which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software, according to Amazon.
‘We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region,’ Amazon said in a report on its service health dashboard.
In a later update, the company reported that it was ‘starting to see some signs of recovery’ but could not say when the service will be fully restored.
‘We do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time,’ Amazon stated.
The outage at Amazon Web Services is significantly worse than the others since it provides cloud computing services to consumers, institutions, governments, and businesses all around the world.
The outage has disrupted a wide range of service providers throughout the world, including iRobot, Chime, CashApp, CapitalOne, GoDaddy, the Associated Press, Instacart Kindle, and Roku. Some users also reported problems with Disney+, although the program appeared to be back up and running just before 1 p.m. in New York.
Ring stated that it was aware of the problem and was trying to remedy it. ‘Our iRobot Home App is now impacted by a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage,’ iRobot wrote on its website.
Amazon’s website is down for at least 20,000 customers in the United States, but others report that the app and the ability to checkout carts are also down, upsetting shoppers wanting to buy Christmas gifts.
DownDetector, a site that monitors online outages, shows North America, parts of Europe and Asia are all experiencing issues.
As of 12.35PM, the site showed more than 28,000 issues reported with Amazon Web Services.
According to Amazon’s status page, the outages are concentrated around the US East 1 AWS region hosted in Virginia, so not all users may be experiencing outages.
‘We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery,’ the company stated.
The crash comes just with just 18 days until Christmas, so many people are currently purchasing gifts – but they will have to wait a little longer to fulfill their holiday list.
And many consumers have flocked to Twitter to share this frustration.
Twitter user ‘The Public Archive’ tweeted: ‘ Amazon is down. The war on Christmas has begun.’
While ‘MoonChild’ is upset the platform crashed right in the middle of their Christmas shopping.
Some users are also having issues with Amazon Music, which some consumers pay $16 a month to access.
Amazon experienced a similar issue in July, when its services were disrupted for nearly two hours and at the peak of the disruption, more than 38,000 user reports indicated issues with Amazon’s online stores.
And in June, the company experienced another outage.
The Jeff Bezos-founded company was one of hundreds of websites around the world that went down on June 8 – others were CNN, The New York Times, Shopify, PayPal, Reddit, the White House and British Government.
Reports said issues were caused by a ‘service configuration’ at their server provider Fastly triggered mass outages.