AWS suffers outage at its US East 2 cloud region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday suffered an outage at one of its four regions in the US, just days after the close of its annual re:Invent conference where it announced a multitude of new and updated services.

The outage, which according to the company lasted for about 75 minutes between 11:34 AM and 12:51 PM Pacific Time, resulted in internet connectivity issues to and from the US-East 2 region.

The loss in connectivity for certain instances at the Ohio region, which was identified by AWS around 12:26, also saw several people taking to Twitter to complain about it.

Later in the day AWS released a blog post saying that the issue was resolved.

“Connectivity between instances within the region, in between regions, and Direct Connect connectivity were not impacted by this issue. The issue has been resolved and connectivity has been fully restored,” the company said in the post.

The other AWS regions in the US are based in California, North Virginia and Oregon. AWS provides cloud services globally through local data center placements that the company calls regions.

Second outage in a year

This is the second major outage suffered by AWS this year. The first outage, which occured at the same region in Ohio on July 28, took down connectivity from AWS EC2 instances, affecting several applications such as Webex and Zoom.

The loss in connectivity was a result of power failure and the issue was resolved in 20 minutes, according to a statement that was released by AWS following the outage.

However, some of its enterprise customers didn’t agree with the company’s estimate of 20 minutes and had quoted larger time periods extending up to three hours.

Outages around this time of the year are starting to become a regular occurrence for AWS.

Last December, just after the annual re:Invent conference, the company suffered an outage at its North Virginia region, disrupting services for more than six hours and impacting thousands of AWS customers including Delta, Southwest Airlines, and Spotify.

During this disruption, AWS EC2 instances were affected, AWS had said in a blog post that detailed the entire reason behind the outage.  

Similarly, in 2020, the company saw its Amazon Kinesis being disrupted on November 25. This disruption lasted for over four hours, according to a blog post released by the company.