What you need to know
- Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, experienced an outage throughout the day on December 7, 2021.
- The outage started spiking around 11:20 am Eastern Time and continued on well into the evening.
- Ring, Alexa, iRobot, Disney+, Venmo, Prime Video, Prime Music, and many other services that rely on Amazon's cloud systems were affected.
Update at 10:00 am ET, December 8: All services appear to be back online and operating normally.
In the late morning hours of December 7, 2021, AWS — that's Amazon Web Services, or Amazon's massive cloud system — began experiencing connectivity issues with servers located in the East Region, which is located in Virginia. Any services that utilize servers in this region will likely continue to experience issues until the connectivity issues have been resolved. Richard Rocha, an Amazon spokesperson, had this to say about the outage:
"There is an AWS service event in the US-East Region (Virginia) affecting Amazon Operations and other customers with resources running from this region. The AWS team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."
The outage affected many web services throughout the day, including Disney Plus, popular payment app Venmo, Netflix, smart home apps like iRobot and Amazon Alexa, and even games like League of Legends, Valorant, and Population: One. Most Amazon services like Prime Music and Prime Video were down during the outage, and customers were even unable to order items off Amazon during parts of the outage.
Originally, it was thought that Ring's cloud services were only affected, as Ring Video Doorbell customers reported that they were unable to access the Ring app at all. That means customers weren't able to view any camera feeds or manage their Ring Alarm. While Ring Alarm Pro allows cameras to store locally on an SD card, customers couldn't access this data because they couldn't access the Ring app at all.
The Ring service dashboard shows that all of Ring's systems are online and, as far as we can tell, all other apps and services that were affected by the outage have now been restored to their full functionality.
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