Amazon server error causes widespread internet shutdown
A fault at an Amazon data centre caused widespread outages at many major websites and services on Tuesday evening.
Amazon.Com Inc.
$176.59
13:09 24/04/24
Nasdaq 100
17,526.80
12:15 24/04/24
Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud data services to over 150,000 online sites, experienced difficulties for several hours and led to the shutdown of sites such as Quora and Tello.
Other problems were reported with programmes such as Spotify, Slack and Netflix.
Apart from the Seattle-based company's online retail platform, Amazon also takes in huge revenue sums from clients of AWS, as it aims to keep up with competitors like Microsoft.
Cloud services have quickly become one of the most profitable areas of the technology sector, as businesses flock to store their data in online servers rather than in computers.
In the company's most recent financial earnings report, AWS accounted for 8% of the total revenue taken in by Amazon.
Amazon said the problem was fixed late on Tuesday evening after issues were reported for over four hours, but the company did not comment on what had caused the issues.
"We've identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1," Amazon explained on its services tracking page.
"As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally," Amazon added later on Tuesday.