AWS Outage Hits Amazon Services, Ring, Whole Foods, Alexa

Whole Foods self-checkout lanes were closed and Alexa devices weren’t working.

Amazon Web Services was dealing with a significant outage Tuesday as Amazon-owned Whole Foods supermarkets closed self-checkout lanes, delivery drivers abandoned their routes and Alexa devices stopped working.

The AWS service health dashboard said as of 6 p.m. PDT that there was a “degradation” of multiple services and the cloud computing giant was working on “resolving the increased error rates and latencies for Kinesis APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. We wanted to provide you with more details on what is causing the issue. Starting at 3:12 PM PDT, a subsystem within Kinesis began to experience increased contention when processing incoming data. While this had limited impact for most customer workloads, it did cause some internal AWS services - including CloudWatch, ECS Fargate, and API Gateway to experience downstream impact.”

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AWS said its engineers have identified the root cause of the issue affecting Kinesis and are working to address the contention. While we are making progress, we expect it to take 2 -3 hours to fully resolve.

Downdetector.com, which tracks outages on the internet, listed 348 reports of AWS outages as of 8:52 p.m. ET.

An AWS spokesperson referred CRN to the service health dashboard for the latest updates.

A CRN reporter observed self-checkout lanes closed at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia. Whole Foods workers said that the Prime codes could not be scanned as well.

The outage was affecting a variety of other services.

Alexa devices were not working. A driver for Amazon Flex wrote on Downdetector that “we all got sent home because they said the app is having a nationwide issue. So don't expect any packages today.”

Another person on Downdetector who identified themselves as an Amazon delivery driver said that “I'm currently waiting for the app to work so that I can finish my route. Unable to use the app to deliver any packages. Apparently it's Amazons network that is down.”

Other Amazon-owned services were down including Ring and Goodreads.