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Explainer: What caused Amazon's outage? Will there be more?

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Posted at 5:12 PM, Dec 08, 2021
and last updated 2021-12-08 17:12:32-05

Robotic vacuum cleaners wouldn't start. Doorbell cameras stopped watching for package thieves, though some of those deliveries were canceled anyway.

Netflix and Disney movies got interrupted and The Associated Press had trouble publishing the news.

A major outage in Amazon's cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet.

On Tuesday, a notice was posted at around 11 a.m. ET on its Amazon Web Service stated that they had identified the root cause and were "actively working towards recovery."

"Many services have already recovered, however, we are working towards full recovery across services," a notice stated at 6 p.m. ET "Services like SSO, Connect, API Gateway, ECS/Fargate, and EventBridge are still experiencing impact. Engineers are actively working on resolving impact to these services."

Amazon has still said nothing about what, exactly, went wrong.

Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of having key internet operations dominated by a handful of big tech companies.