PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024

Amazon Website Back Online Following Brief Outage

Amazon, website, outage

Amazon is back online after a short website outage late Wednesday (June 23) that affected over 6,200 shoppers, 1,700 Prime Video customers and more than 400 Alexa users, Reuters reported, citing the outage monitoring website Downdetector.

Within an hour of going down, Amazon had largely fixed the issue for all but a handful of users. There is no word on why or how the outage happened, Reuters reported.

On June 17, numerous websites worldwide reported outages that originated with disruption at content delivery network (CDN) firm Akamai Technologies. The issue affected the websites and apps of numerous Australian banks, including ANZ, Westpac, St George, ME bank, Macquarie Bank, Allianz, and the Commonwealth Bank. The hour-long disruption also affected the Hong Kong stock exchange.

In the U.S., Discovery and the Navy Federal Credit Union were affected. Several airlines, — American, Southwest, Delta and United — also experienced short outages. Australia’s postal service and Virgin Australia experienced short outages, too.

In separate news, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching a global competition to fix coding bugs, according to a Thursday (June 24) press release. Amazon said the AWS BugBust Challenge is the world’s first contest that has its sights set on rallying developers for the common cause of abolishing some 1 million software bugs.

Amazon Web Services also was offline in November and impacted numerous companies, PYMNTS reported. That outage was caused by issues with its Kinesis service, which is responsible for processing large amounts of data.

The November internet outage also affected Vonage, Reddit, iTunes, GrubHub, Southern California Edison, Square, Chime, Fidelity, Roku, Alexa, Spotify, Autodesk, Affirm, Target’s Shipt delivery service and the New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority website.

Amazon’s Prime Day event Monday (June 21) and Tuesday (June 22) went off without a hitch, bringing in over $11 billion — 6.1 percent more than last year. The 2020 Prime Day totaled $10.4 billion.