Amazon Web Services dashboard goes temporarily offline

The main web application supporting Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing arm of the online retailer, went temporarily offline for some people Tuesday morning.

The problems with the IT management tool began at 11:00 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, a service that tracks tech outages. An Amazon spokesperson acknowledged the issues in an email to Coins2Day and said they were resolved as of 11:39 a.m. ET. The company did not elaborate on the cause.

As of 11:45 a.m. ET, there were no significant public-facing errors for major websites, though Downdetector showed thousands of reports of connection issues having flowed in from New York City and northern Virginia by then.

People affected by the outage reported being unable to access the Amazon Web Services console, a central dashboard used by AWS customers. The app displayed “504 Gateway Time-out” errors, which occur when web servers have trouble communicating with each another. The issue can cause websites not to load properly.

Major AWS customers, including Netflix, Twitch, and Epic Games’ Fortnite, were operating normally at the time the issues were reported.

AWS down? #snowday #aws @awscloud pic.twitter.com/GhZTqdUoNE
— Franz Gusto I SF (@filmfranz) October 12, 2021

https://twitter.com/DrewPearce/status/1447943764144803841

The AWS Console seems broken (504 Gateway Time-out).

AWS Status page: Everything is fine.

Quick Twitter Search: Everything is totally not fine.

At this point, I'm convinced a quick Twitter search is the best status page for large services.
— W. David Winslow (@wdwinslow) October 12, 2021

Did AWS hire the network engineer that brought down Facebook last week? #AWS #outage #awscloud pic.twitter.com/CQkkj44PG1
— Shannon Wilkinson (@SWilkinsonCyber) October 12, 2021

Amazon’s cloud farm is one of the biggest on the Internet, and it provides infrastructure to customers ranging from Snapchat to the U.S. Government. It was previously run by Andy Jassy, who took over as CEO of Amazon when founder Jeff Bezos stepped down in July.

Amazon Web Services’ support feed acknowledged the problem at 11:47 a.m. ET. The company wrote in an update that “we experienced increased error rates and latency for the AWS Management Console. The issue has been resolved and the console is operating normally. This issue did not affect any AWS service APIs, they were operating correctly during this time.”

The outage came a week after Facebook suffered a companywide blackout that lasted for six hours.

Update (10/12/21) 12:50 p.m. ET: An Amazon spokesperson acknowledged the tech issues affecting AWS and said they were resolved by 11:39 a.m.

Clarification (10/12/21) 2:50 p.m. ET: This post has been updated to clarify the outage affected Amazon Web Service console, a dashboard used by AWS customers to manage IT cloud services.