AWS and Alexa services back online after outage

Amazon web services and Amazon voice assistant Alexa were back online after an outage on Sunday that lasted over three hours. Users also reported issues with accessing the Amazon mobile app.

Downdetector, the website that tracks outages reported that Alexa was down for thousands of users in the United States, while an outage in AWS was reported by hundreds of users. More than 16,000 users reported an outage in Alexa at the peak of the disruption.

Users could not complete the account signup process and received error messages on their billing console.

The billing console is used to manage ongoing payments and payment methods registered to AWS accounts.

“Between 6:00 AM and 8:23 AM PDT, customers began experiencing errors when attempting to access the AWS signup page and create new AWS accounts. This issue was resolved and AWS account signup is operating normally,” Amazon said in a statement. 

At 7:41 AM PDT Amazon said it was investigating an issue where users attempting to access AWS account signup are receiving error messages. At 9: 22 AM PDT, the signup page was recovered.

Many users also appeared to be facing problems with the voice control functions of Alexa, while some users also reported facing connectivity issues. Currently, both AWS and Alexa seem to be working normally. 

Previous outages at AWS

AWS suffered an outage in one of its four regions in the USA in December 2022. The outage, which lasted for about 75 minutes, resulted in internet connectivity issues to and from the US-East 2 region.

This was the second outage AWS suffered last year. The first outage in Ohio on July 28, took down connectivity from AWS EC2 instances, affecting several applications such as Webex and Zoom.

AWS suffered a similar outage in 2021 as well. Asana, Smartsheet, Trello, and Slack, which host their services on the AWS cloud, reported problems following the outage. AWS’ own Chime video meeting app was also affected.

Several outages were reported this year

Outages have been on a rise in cloud services this year. Last month, Microsoft’s collaboration suite, Teams, and email service Outlook reported an outage.

Users faced issues while accessing Outlook.com and were not able to send, receive, or search emails. Additional functionality such as the calendar consumed by other services such as Microsoft Teams was also affected.

This was the second global outage reported by Microsoft this year. In January, Microsoft had a global outage affecting products and services such as Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business along with Teams and Outlook.