Amazon Is Down, It's Not Just You [UPDATE: Resolved]
This afternoon the team at Amazon's homepage have reported a temporary outage in service as they "make some improvements" to their service. This down time is not yet recorded officially in Amazon's server status listing save a small blip in the North Virginia Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. There it's reported that "increased API error rates and latencies for tagging related API calls in the US-EAST-1 region" are being investigated a this time.
At the moment it does not appear that Amazon's web server states have been affected by the trouble occurring with their homepage as such. While the message appearing at the main Amazon homepage does appear to reassure users that developers are hard at work improving the site, it's certainly not normal for a site as large at Amazon to pull their entire front page down for a reboot – not in the middle of the day in the USA, anyway.
This error appears to be occurring for users across the USA at the moment, while international users appear to be able to connect without error. Having a peek at the German edition of Amazon, for example, yields results as normal. This would appear to be a far less severe situation than last year's Amazon down-time, but we'll be tracking the whole situation to let you in on its full effects.
UPDATE 2:32 PM CST: It would appear that Audible is down as a result of Amazon's server status. Let us know if you see any other Amazon-connected services down too!UPDATE 2:33 PM CST: Just posted – Amazon server status updates: 12:14 PM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated error rates for the AWS Management Console.
12:33 PM PDT We are currently experiencing elevated error rates affecting customers logging into the Console. Customers who have already logged into the Console are not affected.
UPDATE 3:42 PM CST: Systems back at full! Downtime was roughly 40 minutes in all, during which Kindle Book Sync also appeared to be offline. From Amazon server status: 12:43 PM PDT Between 11:45 AM and 12:32 PM PDT, we experienced an increased error rate for CreateTags and DeleteTags APIs in the US-EAST-1 region. The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.
Today Amazon also saw "Increased API error rates" in their Flexible Payments Service, Mechanical Turk (Requester and Worker), Regional Database Service (N. Virginia), Simple Email Service (N. Virginia), AWS CloudFormation (N. Virginia). Also resolved was an AWS Elastic Beanstalk (N. Virginia) issue with "increased latency creating, deleting and updating Elastic Beanstalk environments in the US-EAST-1 region."
UPDATE 3:48 PM CST: Amazon servers report: 12:37 PM PDT The AWS Management Console experienced sign-in elevated errors between 11:45 AM and 12:32 PM PDT. During this time, customers could not sign into the Console. Customers already logged into the Console were not affected. The Console is now operating normally.
Have a peek at the timeline below of recent Amazon-related events and let us know if this blip is occurring with you as well – and be sure to let us know where you're connecting from, too!