Major outage hits Amazon Web Services; many sites affected

Associated Press
Associated Press

Amazon’s cloud-service network suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many popular sites. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press. For roughly five hours, companies dependent on Amazon’s web services network to run their operations struggled to find workarounds. Among them was Amazon’s own e-commerce operation. Critics said the issue highlighted the danger of centralizing too many of the internet’s key functions in single organizations. By 5 p.m. ET, Amazon said it had identified and fixed the underlying problem, but many online services took far longer to recover.