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On Monday, online retail giant Amazon experienced several outages starting from about 1PM EST.
Amazon has more or less resolved the outages now but they lasted for roughly two hours. During that time, people reported over 11,000 incidents they had with the site, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector and reported on by Reuters.
Back in December 2021, there was a massive outage that disrupted Amazon’s cloud services and affected several sites. Some of them included Amazon itself, Netflix, Disney+, Robinhood, and other apps. Other services that used AWS like Amazon's Ring security cameras, mobile banking app Chime, and robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot also experienced outages.
TechRadar has reached out to Amazon for comment on the outage, and we will update this story if and when we hear back from the company.
Analysis: This outage indicates a larger issue
It seems that these site outages are having a larger effect on consumers and site users in general in recent years.
Years ago, when a website or service went down, only that website or service was affected. But with more of the internet being owned by, or tied to, a single entity like Amazon Web Services (AWS), one service outage can take out multiple seemingly unrelated sites and apps.
An AWS outage back in December of last year proved how crippling a disruption to Amazon’s cloud service could be on the rest of the internet, even for a single day.
It's certainly a major issue, and one that will have a more severe impact as cloud service giants like Amazon consolidates more of the market into fewer points of failure.