Amazon Network Services outage shuts down Boston’s parking app, Bluebikes, and other local services
Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services to many businesses, governments and universities, suffered a major outage on Tuesday that disrupted access to websites and electronic services.
Amazon acknowledged the outage shortly after 12:30 p.m. EST, saying it affected several application programming interfaces in the eastern United States. At around 6 p.m. Amazon said many of its services had recovered, although some were still experiencing outages.
In Boston, the blackout caused a series of disruptions. The city’s transportation department said its ParkBoston app was down and couldn’t be used to pay for parking. The department posted on Twitter that it would not ticket vehicles at meters that had not been paid for, a rare reprieve for drivers.
ALERT: Due to Amazon Web Services outages, the ParkBoston app is currently down and cannot be used to pay for parking. In addition, we are not doing ticketing at the moment.
– BostonTransport (@BostonBTD) December 7, 2021
The local public bike-sharing program, Bluebikes, was also affected and warned that “users may experience delays and errors when trying to rent bikes.”
ALERT: Our software has been affected by the AWS outage, and users may experience delays and errors while trying to rent bikes. We apologize for the inconvenience, if you encounter any error, please wait a moment and try again.
– Bluebikes (@RideBluebikes) December 8, 2021
At Boston College, a business student tweeted that the Canvas website for students and faculty was down, preventing her from submitting an assignment.
AWS is down! How did it affect you? I can’t access canvas to submit an assignment and the Park Boston app isn’t working … # ISYS8621 #D
– Kayla Cyrs (@KaylaCyrs) December 7, 2021
A Jamaica Plain resident said the blackout affected his Alexa device at home, forcing him to “turn my lights on with a switch now like some kind of barbarian.”
Well Alexa is affected by the AWS blackout so I guess I have to turn my lights on with a switch now like some kind of barbarian.
– Mike Lewis-Swanson (@ milewis1) December 7, 2021
The blackout also affected news organizations, including the Associated Press, which announced the blackout in a tweet just after noon. The Boston Globe was unable to run reports online from approximately 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
BREAKDOWN: Users say Amazon Web Services is suffering from a major outage. The company provides cloud computing services to individuals, universities, governments and businesses, including the Associated Press.
Amazon has yet to comment on the outage and few details are available.
– The associated press (@AP) December 7, 2021
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm, told The Associated Press that problems began on the East Coast by mid-morning.
“AWS is the largest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their largest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts on many popular websites and other Internet services,” he said. declared.
Customers have been affected while trying to access Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, Disney + and the McDonald’s app, according to the AP.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at [email protected] Follow him on twitter @jeremycfox.
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