Written by K.A. Roush, CNN
Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage on Wednesday that affected customers across the internet, requiring users to access websites and services for hours.
In what initially appeared to be a global outage, AWS customers including Netflix and Pinterest faced lengthy periods of downtime, forcing them to revert to backup servers or use alternative infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services said in a blog post on Wednesday that Amazon Fulfillment service (AWS Fulfillment), its management and delivery platform for the company’s online warehouses, was the root cause of the outage. The company added that there was a “network event” which affected the number of services available to all users worldwide, adding that it had begun to restore access to some services.
But a full end to the outage had not yet been reached.
“We’re still recovering from this event,” Amazon Web Services said in a separate statement to CNN on Wednesday afternoon. “We know that it took longer than we expected and we apologize.”
Wednesday’s outage marked the fifth time in a year that Amazon Web Services suffered problems, and came weeks after the company blamed a server failure on a “power problem” at its datacenter in Ireland.
Amazon Web Services customers including Netflix, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instacart, Etsy, Pinterest Analytics, Coinbase, Deliveroo, SendGrid, Reddit, and others experienced downtime on Wednesday.
A public Slack outage triggered by the outage was also widely reported. Slack did not respond to a request for comment.
POPULAR WHICH CRITICIZED @AWS for 12 hours for an outage before revealing it was caused by NETFLIX. 🤔😎 https://t.co/Ij6akxlkzk — Laurie Kulikowski (@LaurieKulikowski) November 21, 2018
Also last month, Amazon Web Services customers Instacart and Pinterest suffered app-based outages. In August, Snap had a partial outage that also affected Instagram, Twitch, WhatsApp, and several others, forcing them to use AWS instead.
Many of Amazon’s major cloud customers use AWS. Snap’s Snap Map, Instagram’s Stories, Twitch’s Game Center, and WhatsApp are among its most popular services on AWS. Other top AWS customers include Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, The New York Times, Pandora, Pinterest, Huffington, and Amazon itself.