Amazon’s cloud computing services, which supply a range of top companies in the world, went down Tuesday.
Amazon and other websites were affected beginning around 10:15 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday morning.
Amazon told users it was seeing an impact to multiple application programming interface in the eastern region of the United States.
“This issue is also affecting some of our monitoring and incident response tooling, which is delaying our ability to provide updates,” Amazon said about an hour after the outage began.
“We have identified the root cause and are actively working towards recovery,” it added.
Amazon is best known for its online marketplace but is a key player in the web services space. The company’s profits from providing web services helped it expand its marketplace, which for many years did not make money.
Many people became aware of Amazon Web Services (AWS) when Amazon booted Parler, a competitor to Twitter and Facebook, off its servers in January following the breach of the U.S. Capitol.
Amazon claimed Parler was unwilling and unable to remove content “that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens.”
Parler said it referred violent content to the FBI and sued over the loss of services, but eventually dropped the suit. It switched to SkySilk, an AWS rival.
Other emerging technology platforms have also eschewed AWS due to its actions. Some are working on developing cloud computing services to offer alternatives to the tech giant.
Rumble Video, which does not use AWS, told users Tuesday that all of its services were functioning normally.
“This is the beauty of not relying on AWS and why we will continue to build a parallel infrastructure to compete with the incumbents, both on cloud and video,” it said.
