Amazon Web Services Suffers ‘Severely Impaired’ Services In Select Regions For Back-end Critical API

Amazon Web Services or AWS has indicated that a small portion of its vast Cloud Infrastructure has suffered a malfunction. According to the company, the ‘US-EAST-1 region is suffering a “severely impaired” service.’ The malfunction appears to be inside an API that’s critical, among other services, for the Internet of Things or IoT devices, particularly in the health industry.

AWS sent out a message that indicated the US-EAST-1 region has been impacted by a “severely impaired” service. What this essentially means that a single but important service has broken down. While a single service is down, it will obviously have a negative impact on the performance and reliance of several services that depend on the same.

AWS Kinesis Data Streams API Is ‘Severely Impaired’:

An Amazon AWS outage is currently causing issues to websites and services in the United States, and presumably worldwide data networks that depend on the same. The issue reportedly involves a severe impairment of the “Kinesis Data Streams API” in the US-EAST-1 Region. As a direct result, customers are not able to write or read data published to Kinesis streams. Amazon has issued a statement which reads:

“Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that’s impacted some other AWS services. We are working toward a resolution. We [will] continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region. For Kinesis Data Streams, the issue is affecting the subsystem that is responsible for handling incoming requests. The team has identified the root cause and is working on resolving the issue affecting this subsystem.”

An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App. Please know that our team is aware and monitoring the situation and hope to get the App back online soon. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

— iRobot (@iRobot) November 25, 2020

The issue is reportedly ongoing for quite a few hours, and that too right before Thanksgiving weekend. “This issue,” admitted the AWS team, “has also affected our ability to post updates to the Service Health Dashboard.”

Hi there, we're impacted by the widespread AWS outage. We're working to resolve this as quickly as possible and hope to be back up and running soon. Thank you for your patience! -April

— Glassdoor (@Glassdoor) November 25, 2020

AWS confirmed the issues with Kinesis Data Streams API after observing spikes in error rates of the same. Kinesis API deals with real-time data, such as telemetry from IoT devices. According to marketing material, Amazon Kinesis can handle any amount of streaming data and process data from hundreds of thousands of sources with very low latencies.

Hello. We are currently unable to remove the A line service alert from our website and app because of the widespread Amazon AWS outage. A trains are no longer running local in Brooklyn. We will continue to post updates here as we have them.

— NYCT Subway. Wear a Mask. (@NYCTSubway) November 25, 2020

AWS Kinesis Data Streams API Issues Brings Down Performance Of Several Other Services:

The issue with AWS Kinesis Data Streams API appears to be quite serious and widespread. This is because AWS defaults to US-EAST-1 when endpoints are used with no ‘Region’ setting. The region mentioned is US-EAST-1, which, according to the company’s documentation, is “the default Region for API calls.”

@RogueAmoeba Seems like you store is down. Paddle not working?

— Steven Smith (@IAmStev) November 25, 2020

Several mainstream apps and services have taken to Twitter and Tweeted about how the AWS outage is affecting them. Some of the affected services include, but are not limited to, Roku, Pocket, Flickr, Adobe Spark, Spotify-owned Anchor, Glassdoor, Getaround, and iRobot. Quite a few digital publications have claimed they are having issues with publishing stories due to the outage.

Pretty insane how literally the entire internet breaks whenever AWS goes down.

Also, quite concerning that one company singlehandedly controls 99% of the internet.

— Jeff (@JeffTutorials) November 25, 2020

With so many platforms impacted, quite a few Twitter users have raised questions about the internet’s heavy dependence on AWS.