AWS down AGAIN, hit Twitch, Hulu, Halo, Apex Legends and other services

AWS was down again. It is the second time this month when Amazon's cloud platform for businesses faced a long outage, thereby affecting several websites, games and other services. The outage lasted for around 1.5 hours before the issues were resolved. The affected services mostly involved streaming and game services.

The AWS outage mostly affected services in the US regions. The “US-WEST-1” and “US-WEST-2” areas were impacted with no internet connectivity. Some of the services that were largely affected include Twitch, Hulu, halo, Apex Legends, PlayStation Network, Duo, League of Legends, etc. As of reporting this, all the services are up and running, with Amazon having fixed the issues.

AWS services down twice this month

Amazon came up with a statement following the outage. "Between 7:14 AM PST and 7:59 AM PST, customers experienced elevated network packet loss that impacted connectivity to a subset of Internet destinations. Traffic within AWS Regions, between AWS Regions, and to other destinations on the Internet was not impacted.

"The issue was caused by network congestion between parts of the AWS Backbone and a subset of Internet Service Providers, which was triggered by AWS traffic engineering, executed in response to congestion outside of our network.

"This traffic engineering incorrectly moved more traffic than expected to parts of the AWS Backbone that affected connectivity to a subset of Internet destinations. The issue has been resolved, and we do not expect a recurrence."

AWS services were hit earlier this months, when most of Amazon's services as well as several other services were down following a brief outage. The effects were seen in India too, with reports of several users complaining on Downdetector about being unable to access many of Amazon's services.

The biggest outage this year, however, was the one related to Facebooka nd its services a few months ago. A mega global outage for all Facebook (now Meta) services happened that lasted for around 6-7 hours, crippling popular services such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook itself.