It seems that huge portions of the internet are struggling right now, including Slack, Imgur, the Epic Games Store, and more. Huge portions of the internet are reliant on Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, and when they face issues, so does the entire internet. If you're having problems with some of your favourite websites, you definitely aren't alone. Other affected sites include Coinbase, Hulu, and Udemy, to name a few.
User reports recently spiked on Down Detector. At first, Amazon said on its AWS status page that it was investigating "increased EC2 launch failures and networking connectivity issues" in its USE1-AZ4 availability zone.
"We are investigating increased EC2 launch failures and networking connectivity issues for some instances in a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. Other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue."
However, since then, the company has confirmed a power outage in the USE1-AZ4 availability zone.
"We can confirm a loss of power within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. This is affecting availability and connectivity to EC2 instances that are part of the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone. We are also experiencing elevated RunInstance API error rates for launches within the affected Availability Zone. Connectivity and power to other data centers within the affected Availability Zone, or other Availability Zones within the US-EAST-1 Region are not affected by this issue, but we would recommend failing away from the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) if you are able to do so. We continue to work to address the issue and restore power within the affected data center."
Outages like this are extremely rare, and very few last more than an hour. We've seen some more significant outages though recently from the likes of Facebook, and even another outage from Amazon just last week. As Amazon notes, the company is currently working towards restoring power to the data center, and companies should try to fall away from the affected availability zone if possible.
Update: Amazon says it has now restored power to the majority of instances and networking devices
At 5:18 PST, Amazon confirmed it restored power to the majority of instances and networking devices.
"We continue to make progress in restoring power to the affected data center within the affected Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have now restored power to the majority of instances and networking devices within the affected data center and are starting to see some early signs of recovery. Customers experiencing connectivity or instance availability issues within the affected Availability Zone, should start to see some recovery as power is restored to the affected data center. RunInstances API error rates are returning to normal levels and we are working to recover affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes. While we would expect continued improvement over the coming hour, we would still recommend failing away from the Availability Zone if you are able to do so to mitigate this issue."
Update 2: Amazon says power has been restored to all instances and networking devices
"We have now restored power to all instances and network devices within the affected data center and are seeing recovery for the majority of EC2 instances and EBS volumes within the affected Availability Zone. Network connectivity within the affected Availability Zone has also returned to normal levels. While all services are starting to see meaningful recovery, services which were hosting endpoints within the affected data center - such as single-AZ RDS databases, ElastiCache, etc. - would have seen impact during the event, but are starting to see recovery now. Given the level of recovery, if you have not yet failed away from the affected Availability Zone, you should be starting to see recovery at this stage."