Amazon Web Services suffers hours-long outage

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of e-commerce giant Amazon, reported outages with multiple services on Tuesday that caused issues for thousands of customers for several hours.

The issues began Tuesday just before noon Pacific Time when customers experienced problems accessing services linked to AWS, including authentication and sign-in errors. Amazon’s engineering teams investigated and found an issue with a subsystem related to AWS Lambda that caused errors directly and indirectly for customers. 

AWS Lambda – a service that allows customers to run computer programs without having to manage underlying servers – is used by a number of companies, including T-Mobile, Netflix and Autodesk, according to Reuters. Other Amazon services like Amazon Music and Alexa were also affected.

The website Downdetector.com, which tracks outages by collating status reports from user-submitted errors on its platform, reported a high of around 12,000 reports of outages related to the problem. 

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AWS announced at roughly 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time that, "Many AWS services are now fully recovered and marked Resolved on this event. We are continuing to work to fully recover all services."

Half an hour later, AWS said that its systems are still processing the "backlog of asynchronous Lambda invocations that accumulated during the event, including invocations from other AWS services (such as SQS and EventBridge). Lambda is working to process these messages during the next few hours and during this time, we expect to see continued delays in the execution of asynchronous invocations."

Just before 3:40 p.m. Pacific Time, AWS announced that the backlog was "fully processed" and that, "The issue has been resolved and all AWS Services are operating normally."

Amazon shares were largely flat in after-hours trading Tuesday in the wake of the outage.

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This is a developing story, please check back for updates. Reuters contributed to this report.