Amazon outage disrupts many websites

Amazon’s cloud-service network suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many popular sites. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.

Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage. Shortly thereafter, it reported that “many services have already recovered” but noted that others were still working toward full recovery.

The issue primarily affected Amazon web services in the eastern U.S., it said. Problems began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm — among them, Amazon’s own e-commerce operations.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Richard Rocha confirmed that Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations had also experienced issues as a result of the AWS outage. Rocha added that the company is “working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”