Facebook, Ring, Alexa, Disney+, and more are all down thanks to an Amazon AWS outage [Update]

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Disney+ on iPhone 11 Pro
Disney+ on iPhone 11 Pro (Image credit: Christine Romero-Chan / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Facebook, Alexa, Disney+, and more are all suffering right now.
  • The issue appears related to an Amazon Web Services outage.

Update, December 7 (8:00 pm ET): Amazon has released a statement saying that it cannot provide an ETA for full recovery.

Update, December (10:50 pm ET): Amazon says it has resolved all of the "network device issues."

If you're wondering why you can't access Facebook, Ring, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and more online services, you aren't the only one. At the time of writing Downdetector lists a whole raft of services as experiencing issues — and it all seems to be thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has confirmed that it experiencing an issue and that some customers might be able to access region-specific consoles to try and work around the issue while things are fixed properly.

We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery. This issue is affecting the global console landing page, which is also hosted in US-EAST-1. Customers may be able to access region-specific consoles going to https://console.aws.amazon.com/. So, to access the US-WEST-2 console, try https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/

That might suggest that those who aren't impacted are already accessing services via other geographic locations and it's likely these outages aren't impacting 100% of users as a result.

It sure doesn't look great, though!

Aws Outage Screenshot

Aws Outage Screenshot (Image credit: Downdetector)

Fingers crossed for a quick fix here. You can follow along on the AWS Service Health Dashboard to see how things are progressing.

Update, December 7 (8:00 pm ET) — Amazon has released a statement saying that it cannot provide an ETA for full recovery.

Amazon has released a statement saying that it has made "significant recovery in the US-EAST-1 Region." They did not specify when they will make "full" recovery of its services.

"We have executed a mitigation which is showing significant recovery in the US-EAST-1 Region," Amazon said. "We are continuing to closely monitor the health of the network devices and we expect to continue to make progress towards full recovery. We still do not have an ETA for full recovery at this time."

Update, December 7 (10:50 pm ET) — Amazon says it has resolved all of the "network device issues."

As reported by AppleInsider, Amazon has released another statement saying that the "network device issues" that caused the outage have been resolved.

While Amazon says that the "network devices issues" have been resolved, it is working "toward recovery of any impaired services." Remaining issues should be completely resolved shortly.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.